How audiences flow from one content type to another
It’s pretty well known that audiences spend a meaningful amount of time watching content outside of traditional TV; in fact, that’s the consumption area that is growing the fastest. Measurement companies that focus on either ‘traditional’ content OR ‘new’ content are missing the big picture — because ALL of it matters right now. And that’s why one of our main goals at Diesel Labs is to serve up insights across the entire media landscape, from traditional TV to online video, leaving no stone unturned and no audience a mystery.
When we introduced the concept of Content Analytics a few months ago, we shared an analysis of Netflix’s new show Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. In a somewhat unusual move, Netflix recently announced a holiday special Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: A Midwinter’s Tale landing in mid-December to tide fans over until the new season arrives in 2019. We decided to take our analysis of Sabrina audiences a step further to examine how audiences cross back and forth across different content types, including shows and other media content watched before and after.
The bottom line
Audiences are content-type agnostic and flow from one media type to another seamlessly. Insights like those below are particularly helpful for content producers and distributors as they provide clear signals about recommendation programming when it comes to streaming apps, online video, etc.
Let’s dive in
Note: the “audience” for the segments below is considered to be users who watched, engaged with, or shared related content to each entity.
The left and right columns in the graphic below illustrate the content that the Sabrina audience engaged with before and after — and the amount of time that typically elapsed between media engagements. So you can see that this audience engaged with shows including Doctor Who, Shadowhunters, Queer Eye, Atypical, and Riverdale about 1.3 days before they checked out Sabrina. And after seeing Sabrina, there was an average of one day before they engaged with different media content including Stranger Things, The Crown, Disenchantment, Netflix’s YouTube channel, and Daredevil.
We can do this same analysis with a focus on online video, such as Ariana Grande’s thank u, next music video. About two weeks before watching the music video, this audience engaged with Nicki Minaj’s YouTube channel, The Walking Dead, Kylie Jenner’s YouTube channel, Gossip Girl, and Riverdale. And about 1.7 days after seeing the music video, the audience was checking out Mark Ronson’s YouTube channel, David Dobrik’s YouTube channel, WWE Monday Night Raw, Shadowhunters, and the 2018 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.
We can also run this type of crossover analysis for custom audiences, such as video gamers.
Looking at the above, it’s pretty clear that audiences don’t care about the “walls” between different platforms — they will seek out the best content wherever it lives, making it all the more important to have a full view across the media spectrum when analyzing content in this new media era.
