On November 20, two titans in on-demand video streaming, Netflix and Amazon, each premiered highly promoted new series on the same day. Netflix’s Jessica Jones, a show based on the superhero comic book series Alias, faced off against Amazon’s drama about a world where the Allies lost World War II, The Man In The High Castle. And, as far as Twitter was concerned, Jessica Jones crushed its opponent.
According to Nielsen Twitter TV data provided to Digital Trends, 64,000 tweets were sent about Netflix’s Jessica Jones on its debut, viewed by over 1.6 million people. In contrast, only 4,000 tweets were sent about Amazon’s drama The Man In The High Castle on the same day, viewed by around 400,000 people in the U.S. Netflix and Amazon have both been adamant about holding back viewership stats on original programming. Last December, Nielsen started tracking viewership of streaming services, but very little information regarding the data has been released since.
As such, a good gauge of what people are binging on streaming services is in the tweets and, not surprisingly Jessica Jones dominated its rival.
The show appears to be stacking up well to known commodities, as well. The 1.6 million people who saw at least one tweet about Jessica Jones amounts to nearly eight times the 203,000 people who saw at least one tweet about House of Cards’ third season between its February 27th release date and March 1st, according to data provided to Nielsen data. That said, House of Cards did inspire more tweets than Jessica Jones, boasting 373,000 tweets during its opening weekend — nearly six times as many as Jones. While the numbers for Netflix’s newest series are only for its opening day, its hard to imagine the show would have garnered over 310,000 tweets over Saturday and Sunday to surpass the Kevin Spacey vehicle.
The Twitter prowess of Jessica Jones has separated the Marvel show from some of Netflix’s other highly publicized original programming, as well. Marco Polo and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt only had a combined 32,000 people in the U.S. see at least one of the series’ 53,000 combined tweets. Netflix’s Jessica Jones even beat out the November 16 episode of NBC’s hit show The Voice when it comes to tweets viewed, the latter of which attracted 1,546,000 people in the U.S., beaten out narrowly by Jessica Jones.
Broadcasters like Fox are abandoning same day ratings, and VH1 believes social media activity is as important as traditional TV ratings. With people able to watch more shows on more devices and talk about it with millions of people in more ways every year, traditional viewership numbers could soon be an obsolete metric for TV shows.
