ARTICLE: ‘Days Of Our Lives’: A Peacock Success Story

[I Am A Swede]

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    #schadenfreude

[bongobong]

If episodes are 40 minutes(?), that averages 436,742 viewers per episode for season 59 & 652,173 for season 60.

[Soaplovers]

If the views weren't there, I doubt it would have last 2.5 years and counting as being a solo Peacock property.  

I wouldn't even mind if one of these streamers didn't a primetime soap exclusively on a platform like Peacock that drops an episode a week 52 weeks a year with no breaks.  It would be a good compromise between the old school day time and prime time formats.

[Aback]

Genuine question: how is 600.000 viewers on streaming considered more successful than 2 million people watching on television? I don’t understand it and the whole ‘6 billion minutes watched’ sounds like a really pointless metric to me. 

[Chris B]

I don't think it's about comparing it to tv but within streaming thats a good number of people subscribing to your service, paying a monthly fee and many with commercials which is even more revenue. 

In the streaming world Days is good value for it's cost. When you consider it's budget and the fact that it drives year round subscriptions, it's a big value to a platform like Peacock which is trying to become profitable and is specifically looking for programming that can drive those year round subscriptions.

Edited Monday at 07:20 AM by Chris B

[Manny]

I agree. It is really silly how they always report these billions of minutes watched. I would think that having a show of 10 episode watched 2 billion times is better than having a soap opera with 200 episodes watched 3.5 billion times. Of course DAYS will have amassed more minutes watched, if it has hundreds episodes more per year. This metric makes no sense to me.

But hey, if Peacock is happy... 

The guy that I follow for weekly streaming ratings on YouTube always converts these billions of minutes into views per episodes to have a better measure. So for example Traitors sometimes even appears in weekly top 10. 

I can see this logic actually. But I usually never see this mentioned as the reason for its success. Usually all the streamers are just bragging about the billions of minutes watched.

[Chris B]

The problem is that the 10 episode series is likely going to cost $50-100 million (more in some cases) and those people will cancel their subscription when the series ends. That creates an unwinnable situation where you constantly have to spend those large amounts to churn out constant hits to sustain subscriptions. That's why all of these streaming services are in so much debt.

Around the time Peacock picked up Days they did mention that their goal was to start trying to drive long term subscriptions. In addition to Days they've really leaned into sports and live programming which can help drive year round traffic.

[Manny]

I agree that DAYS is probably doing better from the cost perspective. 

But my point was just that I wouldn't say that DAYS is one of the most watched shows on Peacock. Because if it took DAYS 169 episodes to gather 3.1 billion minutes, but it only took another show 10 episodes to take 1.4 billion minutes, it's very clear. By comparison, 10 episodes of DAYS would not even hit 1 billion minutes, not even close. 

Better by cost, but not by views, is all I'm saying

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Edited Monday at 09:42 PM by Manny

[Aback]

Also - if they're happy with the result, why would they want to invest further? The formula is working the way it is for now, so I don't see anything changing budget-wise, unfortunately. I'm just trying to unspin these disingenuous press releases.

Edited Monday at 09:44 PM by Aback

[DRW50]

I don't think anyone expects a budget increase. They just wish there was one.

[Manny]

Sorry to come back on this... but I wonder how streamers even count the profitability of a show. On network tv is simple.. you have your budget and then you have the ad revenue. If ad revenue is higher, you are earning money, if it's lower, you lose money (in a simplest way explained, surely there are some other factors..)

But I imagine streamers just have to sum up all the budgets/acquiring costs of all the different programs and then all the subscription profit. Because I just don't get how they would split the subscription profits per show. Because if I pay 10 USD per month, but I watch two shows, do they give each show 5 USD from me? What if I watch 5 episodes (but not the full season) of one show, and a whole season of the other show?

For example, I have had Netflix since 2015, never cancelled my subscription in that period. I watch a bunch of stuff. That cannot possible say anything to Netflix about where to allocate my subscription profits. On the other hand, I pay Disney+ since it began and in the last year, I didn't watch anything there (I know, I'm silly to pay if I don't watch, but that's a different topic).. You cannot assign my subscription to any show on Disney+. 

I just don't get how they can calculate the profit per show.. I assume that shows that earn basically no views are easy to just cancel. But others? I don't know... anyone has ideas?

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EDIT: Was browsing now to see what the budgets are for DAYS and Traitors (I am using Traitors as example only because that's literally the only show I know from Peacock). And I found here on SON that DAYS budget until 2023 was 37.5 mil USD. I found online that Traitors budget is between 10-20 mil USD. So even if DAYS budget is cut at Peacock, surely it wasn't cut by 50%. So DAYS is still running a higher cost annually, while Traitors get like 7 times more the viewers per episode. 

I am not trying to ruin this for DAYS fans, really, I was just perplexed how Peacock can claim that DAYS their 2nd most watched show, when it clearly isn't. And again, if Peacock is happy with these figures, great..  

Edited Monday at 10:22 PM by Manny

[Chris B]

It's not network tv. A 10 episode show getting 1.4 billion views in 3 months is not the same as a year-round financial investment which is what they get out of a show like Days. The goal is to maintain a subscription overtime.

[Manny]

I get it. I know what network tv is and what streamers are. The math is still not mathing. But okay, I will stop

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[Chris B]

You're not wrong when you consider none of the streamers are profitable but Peacock has been reducing it's debt each year and seems to be more on track than the other streamers are. They have to find a way to cut costs to be sustainable. You can't just keep churning out these short lived expensive shows hoping for a miracle.

I think the key is affordable programming and also ad supported tiers for additional revenue. HBO Max recently had a big success story with The Pitt which was a modestly budgeted 15 episode series. That needs to be the model. They should be striving for shows with more episodes that can be made for less. 

[Manny]

Absolutely. I agree. Streamers need to stop putting so much money into their shows, because it's insane and unsustainable.