What Drives Entertainment Viewership?
Greg Durkin of Enact Insight asked the audience why doesn’t every tracker use posters and videos instead of words on a page? And why can’t we do syndicated trailer testing? And what if testing could predict viewership? In his long career as an entertainment market researcher, he found five main things that drive viewership: creative positioning, product quality, media + publicity, competition and distribution. With so many choices today, content discovery is harder than ever. The vast majority of content is unheard of. The type of platform also affects viewership. The audience for Apple TV+ is different than Netflix’s. What’s more, content coming out is not being optimized. Releasing content at the proper time can drive viewership. Certain themes can do so as well and attract widely diverse audience segments. The most important thing for a platform is quality, both in content and in navigation and recommendations.
