Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos acknowledged that second seasons of the streamer’s shows tend to draw less well than debut seasons. But, he said, it’s not as bad as a recently prevalent narrative would make it seem.
The streamer also touted some early results from the addition of video podcasts to the platform in its quarterly earnings report — but declined to divulge any specific numbers in a large-scale data release for the first half of the year.
The season two problem narrative was sparked by a recent Bloomberg story detailing steep viewing declines for several shows in their second seasons, among them Beef, The Four Seasons and One Piece. Sarandos didn’t dispute those findings — which came from Netflix’s own publicly released weekly top 10 lists — but said that “in aggregate, we’re not seeing any material change in our second season viewing compared to season ones. Our second seasons are performing well within our bands of expectation.”
Sarandos also said that viewing declines for the second season of a show are “very common” across the industry and offered this rationale for why it happens at Netflix: “It’s even moreso with us, because we launch our shows so big,” he said. “Our global reach, our discovery mechanism, releasing all at once — this enables us to find a very large audience early. Our shows tend to start really big, where most other places, their shows start pretty small and occasionally grow from there.”
Sarandos added, “When we look across the entire portfolio … our season two fall-off has actually slightly improved this year relative to last year.”
As for video podcasts, Netflix made a push into that area this year, adding shows from The Ringer, Jay Shetty, Pete Davidson, Brian Williams and New York’s Breakfast Club radio show, among others. Sarandos noted that the shows overindex with mobile users relative to long-form series and have driven up engagement a bit during daytime hours.
So how are they doing, specifically? Well …
A note at the end of Netflix’s data release said that all video podcasts (there are several dozen) are lumped into an “other shows” grouping that also includes any series that received fewer than 50,000 views (calculated as viewing hours divided by run time) in the first half of the year. That doesn’t necessarily mean that every podcast fell below that threshold, the company says. But since it’s a relatively new type of programming for the platform, Netflix opted not to break out the stats for any single show.
The “other shows” category accounted for 757 million viewing hours from January to June — which sounds like a lot but is only about one percent of the 74.4 billion hours Netflix users spent watching all series in those six months.
