‘The Witcher’ Season 3 Premiere Sees 15% Decrease Versus Season 2 As Audience Wanes Across First 5 Episodes — Samba TV Report
06.07.2023 - 17:07
/ deadline.com
EXCLUSIVE: Is audience interest on the decline for Netflix’s The Witcher?
The first five episodes of Season 3 hit the streamer on June 29. Since then, 1.1M U.S. households have tuned in to the premiere, according to L+5D data from Samba TV. That’s a fairly strong debut, though it is a 15% decrease compared to the 1.3M U.S. households that tuned in to the Season 2 premiere during the same window.
Interestingly, viewership for the remaining four episodes of Season 3 suggests that audiences may not be sticking with the series. Samba measured that about 893,000 households watched Episode 2, and that shrank to 750,000 for Episode 3. For Episode 4, 602,000 households tuned in, while Episode 5 drew less than half the premiere audience with 505,000 U.S. households.
According to Samba, all eight episodes of Season 2 drew more than 1M U.S. households during their first week of streaming after they debuted in December 2021. Season 1 of The Witcher remains one of Netflix’s most popular TV seasons of all time.
Samba’s data doesn’t tell the whole viewing story, though it does give a pretty good picture of the series’ performance in its first few days of availability. Samba TV doesn’t measure mobile, however, their sample includes a panel of 3 million terrestrial TVs, weighted to the U.S. Census. By contrast, Samba TV’s panel is nearly 100x larger than Nielsen’s household footprint of 45K homes.
Nielsen has yet to report any data for Season 3 of The Witcher. Netflix reported that the first five episodes drew 15.2M views (73M viewing hours divided by a 4 hour and 49 minute runtime) in its first weekend on the platform — which easily catapulted it to No. 1 on the streamer’s Top 10 TV list for the week.
Time will tell whether