To Binge or Not To Binge: Who Won The Battle Between ‘Game Of Thrones’ And ‘Stranger Things’?

The two biggest shows of 2019 in America (and around the globe) are probably Game of Thrones and Stranger Things. I say “probably” because while Netflix did release some data on Stranger Things season 3 last week, they release “global” viewership numbers, but not US-data. Meanwhile, HBO doesn’t release global viewership of its TV series, instead saying that Game of Thrones reached 44 million customers across platforms, but leaving out most international viewing. (Also, all this analysis usually leaves out India and China, which dwarf the rest of the world’s population.)

These two hugely popular series have a lot in common. They are expensive genre series (high fantasy and retro sci-fi, respectively) that thread the careful line of being both immensely popular with the masses, while staying critically adored. In the last year, both also had a ton of product tie-ins, from a Game of Thrones Budweiser commercial to a Stranger Things Windows 1 revival. Both have started selling merchandise; while Funko still doesn’t have a Bosch doll for sale, they have plenty of GoT and ST3 merchandise.

The difference really boils down to the release schedule. Starting on April 14th, Game of Thrones Season 8 came out every week for 6 weeks. On July 4th, Stranger Things Season 3 came out, all 8 episodes at one time. The key question for the streamers is which model to emulate: the sustained conversation of Game of Thrones versus the condensed conversation of Stranger Things?

In today’s over-saturated, 24/7 media culture, standing out is harder and harder to do. For big tent pole movies, the studios now regularly shell out hundreds of millions of dollars to build awareness. In the crowded streaming landscape, even the budgets to launch TV series are climbing, with networks & streamers now spend billions marketing their TV series.

The corollary to this is that if you can stand out by “being a part of the conversation”, you get free impressions just by releasing new episodes. The go-to example of this was Game of Thrones during its finale run. No matter what website you went to from pop culture focused like IndieWire or Decider to general news like Vox or Slate to even traditional newspaper like The Washington Post and The New York Times, on the Monday after a GoT episode released, each site often had multiple articles recapping the previous night’s episode.

This lasted for six straight weeks. Analyst Alan Wolk called this “Game of Thrones spring”:

“As in it was hard to look at any news or entertainment website or social media platform and not see references to the show—recaps, predictions, jokes, GIFs. It was a six week long commercial for AT&T’s prize possession.”

Compare that to Stranger Things. During 4th of July weekend, when internet traffic tends to drop due to travel and outdoor activities, Season 3 did dominate the coverage on most websites. Unlike GoT, after a week, the Stranger Things 3 conversation had mostly dwindled to nothing. Now I can’t find an article on a front page of most websites; Stranger Things time has already passed and it’s only been a month.

The anecdotal data says that Game of Thrones took over the conversation. Does the data show owning the conversation leads to higher ratings, which is what networks really care about? It does, but it’s a messy data set.

For instance, I could spin a really positive case about Game of Thrones just looking at their US viewership (tracked by Nielsen) after every episode and comparing that to social data. Here’s a wonderful visual from Wikipedia showing GoT‘s growth in viewers every season:

It’s just a steady line creeping up and up. Likely the conversation on social medial helped grow those viewers. For one data point on that, here’s a snapshot of how Reddit’s traffic looked during Game of Thrones Season 8, according to Nacho Analytics, including an insane 2.6 billion pageviews:

The challenge is comparing that Game of Thrones narrative with Stranger Things. Maybe Stranger Things had a huge surge in interest, it’s just concentrated in one time period. Since Netflix doesn’t release data for most shows, we don’t know how much Stranger Things has grown since Season 1 or 2. (We just know it has, since Netflix said it is their biggest show.)

Since we can’t compare ratings directly, we have to use indirect comparisons.

An imperfect, but reliable tool for this is to use Google Trends data—which measures search terms—as a proxy for interest. Here is a comparison to Game of Thrones to Stranger Things:

Game of Thrones clearly had much higher peaks, nearly twice as large as Stranger Things. Interestingly, Stranger Things’ interest has only slowly dropped off, even being a little higher than Game of Thrones mid-week interest.

This scale of conversation was echoed on social media. According to Fizziology, Game of Thrones generated 17 million social mentions on Twitter after its premiere, compared to “only” 4 million mentions by Stranger Things. The difference is GoT< kept the social conversation—for better or worse on Twitter—alive for the next six controversial weeks.

I could ask a lot of tough questions about the above data points. Are two data examples enough to prove that weekly releases build momentum while bingeing does not? Probably not. Well, definitely not. Stranger Things did really well in Nielsen’s streaming data, reaching 26.4 million unique viewers in the US, averaging 12.8 million viewers per minute. Those are numbers just a hair below Game of Thrones, with no weekly conversation to drive it. Not to mention, you could argue that I shouldn’t even compare a season finale of a once-in-a-generation show to the third season of a TV series just hitting its stride.

Unfortunately, the data alone can’t answer this question.

I wish I had some clever business technique that solved this problem for Netflix and future streamers. Instead, this is one of those situations where business leaders need to decide for themselves what makes sense after weighing the pros and cons.

The Pros and Cons of All at Once: Long Live the Binge!

If you want to be great at business—and you know nothing else—consider just making decisions with the customer in mind. Arguably, the growth of Amazon is dedicated to Jeff Bezos’ overwhelming focus on this principle. If you make all your decisions obsessed with customers, it’s hard to go wrong.

And customers love the binge!

Netflix pioneered bingeing and man did it work! When folks started watching Breaking Bad, they didn’t just watch one show, they churned through the entire thing, dozens of episodes at a time. Netflix has even trained some customers to wait to watch non-Netflix shows until they can binge the entire thing. As the 18 million subscribers who finished Stranger Things Season 3 in one weekend showed, this can really work.

Some streamers who have experimented with weekly releases—as Amazon Studios did when releasing their first two series Alpha House and Betas—have shifted to binge releasing content after customer complaints. Even some licensed series are weekly released on Netflix and Amazon, but that hasn’t convinced them to change their strategy, which should tell us something.

(As a note, it isn’t that customers don’t wait for their favorite series in the binge model, it’s that they don’t know they’re waiting. Even producing for binge releases, most streaming TV series are completed in order. This means that you could have watched Stranger Things 3 back in early June, you just didn’t know it.)

The Pros and Cons of Weekly Release: Celebrate the Weekly Conversation!

On the other hand, if you have a hit, you want to maximize its growth and impact. That’s how you get the best return on investment for your content. (And allow you to make even more.)

And even though customers hate waiting, it isn’t as if we hate Christmas because we have to wait 364 days each year for it. In some ways, it helps build up anticipation.

If a show is popular and buzzy, it’s hard to deny that a weekly release helps convince people to start watching RIGHT NOW. Some of the biggest hits of the last decade—shows like Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, and Breaking Bad—leveraged the advent of digital news sites writing recaps that were then shared on social platforms that then became fodder for podcasts discussing the latest twists and turns. This weekly conversation helps drive the wheel of engagement and avoiding it—the way Stranger Things seems to—could be a huge mistake.

Get ready for a twist that would make M. Night Shyamalan jealous. It’s actually … Big Little Lies?!?

Pop culture sites—or even mainstream news sites with a pop culture insert—still need a big show to anchor their front pages on Monday mornings. As I was doing research for this article, what I noticed was that one show that kept popping up now that Stranger Things isn’t on the radar. Across websites like Decider, The Ringer, Vox, and Slate, in the “Sunday TV show recap” slot is the same show, Big Little Lies.

The result? Season 2 achieved a ratings high for the series.

Even if Netflix doesn’t want to change, well, HBO is fine with that. They’ll keep the conversation going.

The Entertainment Strategy Guy writes under this pseudonym at his eponymous website. A former exec at a streaming company, he prefers writing to sending emails/attending meetings, so he launched his own website. You can follow him on Twitter or Linked-In for regular thoughts and analysis on the business, strategy and economics of the media and entertainment industry.