The Crown’s Ratings Don’t Measure Up to Stranger Things, but the Audience Is a Valuable One

Slightly more than a month after publishing its first ratings report on the Netflix original series Stranger Things, Nielsen is providing early audience insights for Season 2 of another of the streaming services's original series, The Crown. And while total audience figures might not look spectacular, brands are now aware, thanks to Nielsen's SVOD data, that The Crown's viewers are well-to-do, older, highly educated and mostly female. As with Stranger Things, Nielsen's data is based on viewership within the first three days of the season's availability. In the case of The Crown, that's Dec. 8-10. The Crown, which chronicles the life of Queen Elizabeth II from the 1940s to modern times, delivers an older audience than Stranger Things. Roughly half of the Season 2 audience is over 50. Also, The Crown's audience is also relatively well-to-do (not the case with Stranger Things), with a median income of nearly $90,000. The Crown's audience also skews strongly female, with 65 percent of overall viewership within the first three days being women. According to Nielsen SVOD Content Ratings, within the first three days of availability, the Season 2 premiere episode of The Crown averaged 3 million total U.S. viewers and nearly 1.3 million in the 18-49 demo. How does that compare with the season premiere of Stranger Things? Not particularly well. According to Nielsen’s SVOD ratings for Season 2 of Stranger Things, 15.8 million total viewers watched the first episode over the first three days, including a whopping 11 million people in the 18-49 demo. Those figures were massive, as Adweek reported, ahead of the live-plus-3 ratings for The Walking Dead Season 8 premiere on Oct. 22 (15 million total viewers and 8.8 million in the demo). Below are the ratings for Season 2 of The Crown by episode: Episode 1 averaged 3 million total viewers Episode 2 averaged 2.4 million total viewers Episode 3 averaged 1.8 million total viewers Episode 4 averaged 1.4 million total viewers Episode 5 averaged 1.1 million total viewers Episode 6 averaged 861,000 total viewers Episode 7 averaged 738,000 total viewers Episode 8 averaged 674,000 total viewers Episode 9 averaged 533,000 total viewers Episode 10 averaged 462,000. The Crown Season 2 averaged 1.3 million total viewers per episode within the first three days of availability. During those three days, 18- to 49-year-olds watched an average of 2.6 episodes. That's slightly down from the 2.9-episode average the Stranger Things Season 2 viewers watched within three days. But don't expect Netflix to go out and tout these numbers. The company previously told Adweek in a statement that “the data that Nielsen is reporting is not accurate, not even close, and does not reflect the viewing of these shows on Netflix.”