Images: Netflix

Welcome to your weekly recap of the biggest stories from Netflix’s top 10 hourly figures for the week ending November 17, 2024. This week, the focus is definitely on the big fights that took place live (from less for some) Friday. night. Let’s break down all the numbers released by Netflix so far and check with Esoteric and some of last week’s other big debuts, including a new Christmas hit, freezing hot.

Note: In this report on Netflix watch hours from November 11, 2024 to November 17, 2024, we will use “full views equivalent” or CVE, expressed in millions. This means that we divide the viewing hours announced by Netflix by the duration of the films or series. This allows for better comparisons between films and series, but it is not an audience measurement. This is the minimum number of views if they were all complete from the first second to the last of the movie or season.

1. Is Cobra Kai okay? We don’t know!

I am sorry to tell you that the figures for Cobra Kai Season 6B is unusable since Netflix includes views of episodes from the previous part in the weekly total. This wouldn’t be a problem if Part 1 hadn’t been released three months ago, but as it stands I can’t make anything out of this data. It doesn’t matter, because it’s the final season, the last part being released in February 2025.

2. Esoteric Season 2 viewership lags slightly behind season 1 in week 2

The figures from the second batch of Esoteric The Season 2 episodes finally provide a point of comparison with the Season 1 numbers, and it’s not as disastrous as I had imagined last week. The drop compared to season 1 for the same batch of episodes and the same observation period is relatively small.

3. Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

It was last week’s main attraction, and sure enough, it’s an event, at least according to Netflix, which self-proclaimed the Paul vs. Tyson fight as the most streamed sporting event in history.

Let’s try to look beyond the rather laughable announcement, probably filled with asterisks like “streamed but not necessarily watched”, and focus instead on the myriad of figures revealed by Netflix for the occasion. This fight is a great example of the complexity of measuring streaming audiences.

What numbers did Netflix share for these fights? Yes, I say fights because there were four matches, including the Paul-Tyson fight.

• 60 million accounts watched the program: This figure marks a return to Netflix’s old method of sharing audience data, which only reports a program’s “reach” but does not reveal how many people actually watched the matches in their entirety or which matches especially. This represents 60 million accounts out of 280 million existing.
• 65 million simultaneous streams during the Paul-Tyson match: This is a relatively new measure for Netflix. These are simultaneous streams, which do not indicate the time spent watching but rather the technical load of the platform. This could explain the interruptions and slowdowns in streaming during the event, at least in the United States, where they had to manage 38 million simultaneous streams. In other parts of the world, the fight was much easier to follow, probably because it was broadcast at night and fewer people watched it live.
  108M viewers on average per minute for the Paul-Tyson fight (125M over the weekend): This is another new number, not from Netflix but from a mix of third-party sources in the US (like TVision Data, which I’d never heard of) and key markets where Netflix operates, extrapolated on a global scale. This is the number that most media outlets will put forward, and the one that Netflix puts forward the most, but it has the weakest methodological basis and seems a bit arbitrary.
  46.6 million EVCs/“views” over the weekend, or 224.6 million hours viewed: This is my favorite Netflix metric because it’s simple and allows comparison with three years of historical data. However, it’s not about viewership numbers; it’s an arbitrary scale for comparing programs. The main limitation is that it includes viewing hours for all four fights, not just the Paul-Tyson fight. It’s a shame that Netflix didn’t split the four fights into separate shows, as that would have provided clearer data on how the main fight performed.

Which of these metrics is the most reliable? Which one is worth sharing?

You know my opinion, so let’s compare this launch using the EVC metric. Firstly, it is by far the most watched live event on Netflix. There are no comparable events, so let’s broaden the field and compare it to the best TV series launches (because the fights are categorized as TV series, not movies, and at 289 minutes in total, it’s is closer to a series than a film).

Fights rank below launches Stranger Things Season 4B and Money theft Season 5A in terms of EVC but still performing well, especially since the fights were broadcast in the evening in the United States, making it more of a two-day launch than a three-day one. It’s a success by every available metric, but for every metric the comparisons are lacking, so we can’t really understand how much of a success it is – at least until NFL games, anyway!

4. freezing hot Is this another Netflix Christmas hit

Netflix’s Christmas movie cycle continues with freezing hotwhere a snowman comes to life. Yes, we can’t make this up, but the audience seems to be there, since the film’s launch is almost on par with Meet Me Next Christmas, released last week, scoring 16 million CVE in 5 days.

5. The Return of the King: Fall and Rise of Elvis Presley

Elvis Presley isn’t getting much attention on Netflix this week, as the documentary about him got off to a very poor start – only 3.3 million CVE in 5 days – one of the worst debuts of the year .

6. The lost children

A documentary that starts very well is The lost childrenthe Colombian film which tells the true story of the survival of four children in the jungle. With 7.9 million CVEs in 4 days, it is the best debut ever for an international documentary released on a Thursday.

7. The sisters’ quarrel

The (very long) Mexican series The sisters’ quarrel had an average start for a Mexican 2024 series released on a Wednesday, with 3.3 million CVE. However, his length will likely help him maintain decent performances in the coming weeks.

That’s all for this week, don’t hesitate to tell us what you think in the comments below.