Stranger Things beats The Walking Dead – Nielsen

The second season launch of Stranger Things brought SVOD service Netflix more viewers than the latest opener of The Walking Dead, according to Nielsen data.

The stats suggest a whopping 15.8 million people watched the premiere of horror drama Stranger Things on TVs in the US in its first three days from launch. Nielsen described the launch as a “significant viewing event”.

In comparison, AMC series The Walking Dead took 11.44 million, consolidated up to 15 million in the US.

The Stranger Things number comprises nearly eleven million TV viewers.

Netflix has previously rubbished Nielsen’s new measurement data analysis, claiming the numbers it is providing are “not accurate, not even close” to the real figures.

The problem for the Los Gatos-based Netflix is it steadfastly refuses to release any viewing data, as it believes this is irrelevant to its ultimate metric, subscriber numbers. The same applies to other SVOD players such as Amazon.

Nielsen suggests an average of four million people watched Stranger Things episodes following the premiere, and that an eye-opening 361,000 watched all nine episodes on launch day.

Nielsen’s SVOD tracking includes data points such as reach and frequency. It will soon expand to include Hulu and Amazon.

TBI has been tracking demand for digital originals for some time through our In-demand charts, which are provided by entertainment data science firm Parrot Analytics.

Our latest charts, from the Netherlands, showed Stranger Things was generating more demand than The Walking Dead last week.