When Paramount+ launched in March 2021, it joined a crowded market of streaming services that already includes Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, HBO Max, Apple TV+, Peacock, and numerous niche services.
But as streaming is taking over from television, many who follow the streaming wars have noticed that there isn't really an "official" way to tell what the most popular shows are on these streaming services.
The theatrical movies have the box office, and broadcast and cable TV have the ratings. Streaming, however, lacks a central place to get such complete information.
With that in mind, here are some of the different ways to find out what's popular on streaming services such as Netflix and Disney+.
1. Streaming Services' Self-Reporting
After Coming 2 America debuted on Amazon Prime Video in March 2021, Amazon issued a statement to the media about the movie's success, calling it "the No. 1 opening weekend of any streaming movie in 2021 so far, and the No. 1 weekend of any streaming movie in the past 12 months."
What the company didn't release, however, is exactly how many people watched the movie.
It's in line with what several of the streaming services have been known to do, in terms of making non-specific announcements about how successful a particular show or movie is.
This includes Amazon, which last year stated that "tens of millions" of viewers watched its Borat sequel. It's a frequent tactic in these days in which the streaming services are in heavy competition with each other.
These sometimes arrive in press releases, and sometimes in information released to the press. But either way, this is a way for the services to brag about a hit, without revealing complete information about all of their shows. That way, they don't have to say anything about the shows that flop.
Netflix is a bit more transparent than most of its competitors. The streamer announced in late January that the costume drama Bridgerton had been viewed by 82 million households worldwide, which made it the most-watched show in the service's history.
2. Netflix's Top 10 List
While Netflix does not release complete viewership figures for its shows and movies, it will announce a specific viewership number for its most popular programming, as it did with Bridgerton.
In 2020, Netflix added a Top 10 bar to its menu, allowing you to see what's popular.
The Top 10 lists, which do not include any type of viewership figures, have been known to include popular new shows. However, it's common for an obscure movie from a few years earlier, like Molly's Game or Savages, to make a surprise appearance.
3. Nielsen SVOD Content Ratings
In 2020, The Nielsen Company, the same company that has long put out TV ratings, began releasing weekly ratings of streaming shows on Nielsen.com. Ever since then, the weekly list of original shows has been dominated by Netflix most weeks, although occasionally a popular show from Disney+ or another streamer will make an appearance.
Not every streaming service participates in the Nielsen streaming ratings; as of February 2021, the ratings included Amazon Prime, Disney+, Hulu, and Netflix, but not HBO Max, Peacock, Apple TV+ or CBS All Access/Paramount Plus.
Also, while Nielsen's TV ratings provide numbers of viewers, its streaming ratings use a different metric, of total minutes viewed. For the week of February 15-21, 2021, the Netflix true-crime series, Crime Scene: The Vanishing at Cecil Hotel, took the top spot with 806 million minutes viewed.
4. Parrot Analytics
Parrot Analytics is an independent film company that releases reports about the most popular streaming shows, using a metric showing how much demand the shows have compared to that of the average show.
For instance, on the week ending March 20, 2021, WandaVision was the most popular streaming show on the "Digital Originals" chart, with 44.8 times the demand of the average series.
The Mandalorian was second, despite its season having wrapped up months earlier, with 37 times the demand of an average series. The popular, meme-inspiring Netflix series Stranger Things was third, with 35.9 times the average demand. Despite there being no new episodes for nearly two years.
5. Samba TV
A company called Samba TV gets its data directly from customers' smart TVs, in order to measure viewership and release data about audiences, some of which is released to the media. The company releases figures for streaming as well as network shows.
Samba TV found that about 1.7 million households in the U.S. watched The Falcon and the Winter Soldier in the show's opening weekend, compared to 1.6 million for WandaVision's premiere four months earlier.
Samba TV also put the opening weekend viewership of Zack Snyder's Justice League, also known as the "Snyder Cut," at 1.8 million viewers, which ranks slightly below the 2.2 million households that watched Wonder Woman 1984 in December 2020, also on HBO Max.
6. Reelgood
The website and application Reelgood is meant to solve another modern-day problem of the streaming era. Which is that many viewers aren't able to tell which shows are on which service. Reelgood allows you to search its database to see where to find each show or movie.
In addition to that, Reelgood offers a dedicated page for "Trending TV Shows." The feature doesn't have stats, but the page does show what's popular on the site.
As of March 24, 2021, the top trending show was Falcon and the Winter Soldier, followed by Resident Alien, Yellowstone, and Ted Lasso. The chart shows where the shows are streaming, how many free episodes are available, and how well they have been rated by users on IMDb and Reelgood themselves.
The site's Popular Movies page, meanwhile, listed Zack Snyder's Justice League first, followed by Disney+'s Raya and the Last Dragon and Netflix's Sentinelle.
Reelgood will also sometimes send the media graphics about, say, which states in the US preferred Falcon and the Winter Soldier over Justice League.
7. JustWatch
JustWatch works similarly to Reelgood, also recommending shows and movies to you. That site also has a trending page, which can be filtered by movies and TV shows.
Overall, as of March 24, 2021, Coming 2 America was listed first, followed by the TV series, A Discovery of Witches, and the Netflix movie, I Care a Lot.
There Are Many Ways to Stream
Whether you're looking for a show to watch, or making a bigger determination about whether to subscribe to a specific service, there's plenty of information out there to let you know what the most popular streaming shows are at any given time.
You can listen to what the streaming companies announce publicly, look at the weekly Nielsen ratings, or check out the weekly rankings inside Netflix. You can also check out the trending sections on Reelgood and JustWatch.
Just don't expect complete information about how many people are watching specific movies and shows.
