A Few Remarks about Viewership Data
Jul. 22nd, 2023 03:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutFirst, a link that I stole from wikipedia:
https://archive.org/details/variety66-1922-03/page/n46/mode/1up?view=theater
That links to a 1922 article in Variety magazine, in which they say they’ve got some box office receipt estimates, describe how they generated them, and how they planned to expand on those estimates in the future and why. Specifically, this was aimed at part at “the independent producer and distributor who had something that the Broadway house wanted and he will be in a position to combat the “poor business” argument handed him”.
Next, the observation that in the same article, big movie venues were identified with specified studios in 1922, a practice that would continue until the Paramount antitrust case of 1948:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures%2C_Inc.
After that, studios were prohibited from owning theaters, until that decree finally ended in 2020 (well, okay, maybe the process of ending that decree started in 2020 and was fully baked in August 2022).
Next, the observation that anyone reading this grew up accustomed to hearing about Nielsen ratings. Nielsen is of course a company that pays consumers to tell Nielsen what they watch on TV and then Nielsen sells that data to interested people. As of 2020, Nielsen started to generate streaming viewing data as well as broadcast and cable viewing data.
In the course of me not successfully avoiding conversations about the strike, I’ve now had two conversations (at least — two that went on long enough for me to remember) that involved someone who Was Not Me saying I don’t really know why streamers are so unwilling to share their viewership data and me saying, well, we didn’t get really good box office data until the antitrust stuff for movie studios, so why would it be any different here. Streamers, like all studios, know that the data they have, in the hands of creators, would give creators a much better chance to negotiate fairly with the streamers, just as data had that effect on studios.
Were box office receipts possible to estimate during the pre-Paramount decree era? Sure, in more or less the exact same way that Nielsen can now estimate the top 10 streaming shows.
There’s a pattern here. One of the ways that trusts, monopolies, people who don’t really want to have to deal with That Much Competition make sure that they don’t have to deal with That Much Competition is by making it so people don’t even realize _why_ they are doing what they are doing _while doing it to suppress competition_. Streamers are very selective about the data they share on viewership because they know just how bad it is for them if everyone got a peek at a lot of it.
ETA: Only very marginally related (<— might be a joke!): there has been news coverage of Netflix subscriber growth again in the wake of the Stop Sharing Passwords campaign.
https://archive.org/details/variety66-1922-03/page/n46/mode/1up?view=theater
That links to a 1922 article in Variety magazine, in which they say they’ve got some box office receipt estimates, describe how they generated them, and how they planned to expand on those estimates in the future and why. Specifically, this was aimed at part at “the independent producer and distributor who had something that the Broadway house wanted and he will be in a position to combat the “poor business” argument handed him”.
Next, the observation that in the same article, big movie venues were identified with specified studios in 1922, a practice that would continue until the Paramount antitrust case of 1948:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures%2C_Inc.
After that, studios were prohibited from owning theaters, until that decree finally ended in 2020 (well, okay, maybe the process of ending that decree started in 2020 and was fully baked in August 2022).
Next, the observation that anyone reading this grew up accustomed to hearing about Nielsen ratings. Nielsen is of course a company that pays consumers to tell Nielsen what they watch on TV and then Nielsen sells that data to interested people. As of 2020, Nielsen started to generate streaming viewing data as well as broadcast and cable viewing data.
In the course of me not successfully avoiding conversations about the strike, I’ve now had two conversations (at least — two that went on long enough for me to remember) that involved someone who Was Not Me saying I don’t really know why streamers are so unwilling to share their viewership data and me saying, well, we didn’t get really good box office data until the antitrust stuff for movie studios, so why would it be any different here. Streamers, like all studios, know that the data they have, in the hands of creators, would give creators a much better chance to negotiate fairly with the streamers, just as data had that effect on studios.
Were box office receipts possible to estimate during the pre-Paramount decree era? Sure, in more or less the exact same way that Nielsen can now estimate the top 10 streaming shows.
There’s a pattern here. One of the ways that trusts, monopolies, people who don’t really want to have to deal with That Much Competition make sure that they don’t have to deal with That Much Competition is by making it so people don’t even realize _why_ they are doing what they are doing _while doing it to suppress competition_. Streamers are very selective about the data they share on viewership because they know just how bad it is for them if everyone got a peek at a lot of it.
ETA: Only very marginally related (<— might be a joke!): there has been news coverage of Netflix subscriber growth again in the wake of the Stop Sharing Passwords campaign.