money ‘Outer Banks’ Leads Nielsen U.S. Streaming Chart After Season 3 Debut, ‘The Last Of Us’ Dominates Acquired Programming With Episode 7
Outer Banks took over Nielsen’s U.S. streaming chart for the week of February 20 to 26. Following the release of Season 3 on February 23, the Netflix series drew nearly 3.2B viewing minutes during that measurement interval.
According to Nielsen, nearly 1B of those viewing minutes (roughly a third) came from Seasons 1 and 2, suggesting that the release of the third installment attracted many new viewers as well as re-watchers. Nielsen doesn’t generally indicate viewing by season, so this gives interesting insight into how much of the viewing from this interval came from Season 3. Netflix self-reported that all three seasons were among its Top 10 English-language series for that week.
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Audiences were also enthralled by Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal, which generated about 1.4B viewing minutes and came in at No. 2 on the overall streaming list.
Once again, HBO’s The Last of Us is putting up a strong showing, moving back up to third place on the charts this week. The Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey-led series managed about billion-minute week with the release of its seventh episode, generating 1.2B viewing minutes on HBO Max alone. It was the most-watched acquired programming of the week. Nielsen says that Episode 7 (which was released with only a few hours left in the measurement interval) accounted for 22% of the weekly total while Episode 6 made up 64%.
As always, Nielsen’s measurement window only accounts for a few hours of viewing of the most recent episode — in this case Episode 7 — since it bows on Sunday nights. Nielsen streaming measurements only account for viewing on HBO Max, so these numbers don’t reflect any viewership on HBO’s linear channel. According to HBO, Episode 7 saw 7.7M same-day viewers across linear and digital platforms.
Netflix’s We Have a Ghost took fourth place on the overall list with 930M minutes viewed. While it did drop significantly, from No. 1 to No. 9, You also managed to stay on the chart with 797M minutes viewed.
New Amsterdam, which streams on both Netflix and Peacock, fell to No. 6 with 850M minutes viewed. Bluey held down the fort for Disney+, and the rest of the spots went to Netflix with Cocomelon, NCIS, and Perfect Match.
Here is the full Top 10, with streaming service, title, number of episodes (“1″=feature film) and minutes of viewing:
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