Lord of the Rings TV Series Purchased by Amazon

[Skulltaker]

100 million views is 100 million active subs paying to watch the content, the sub cost from amazon prime has made all the money back they have spent on RoP so far and a enough to fund it a few more time, also the show has not cost them 1 billion yet not until the second season has been completed at least, the cost is around 49 million per episode.

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Its 100 million viewers so thats 100 million seperate ppl at least watching the show, amazon prime subs are over 200 million so that generates plenty money to make new tv shows which inturn keeps more ppl subscribed to the platform, you need to spend money to make money.

First of all, no, 100 million viewers is not 100 million active subs. And Amazon has no way of knowing how many people actually watched the show, because you can't tell if there's one person in front of the TV, or 100. I broke that down in the post you quoted, but I guess you're not doing so well with numbers. My teaching days are behind me, so excuse me if I don't take you for a tour of basic math.

Even if you're being generous with the numbers, Amazon lost hundreds of millions of Dollars on that show so far, which they probably knew from the start. Making money was never the goal, it was broadening the audience. Unless they release sub counts from pre and post ROP, we'll not know if they achieved it. I doubt it, though.

[Kumorii]

It's even less than that. While technically against the TOS, Prime subs are often shared over several households (just like other streaming services)

100 million views doesn't equal 100 million accounts that watched the series. It's probably more people that watched it, but significantly less active subs. For the 9 people I know personally that watched the series, only one active prime account was used, divided over 3 households, so one sub accounts for 3 complete viewings of the series. I doubt that that is representative, but it's pretty safe to say that drastically less than 100 million accounts actually streamed RoP.

Didn't even think of that, good catch.

[rhorle]

First of all, no, 100 million viewers is not 100 million active subs. And Amazon has no way of knowing how many people actually watched the show, because you can't tell if there's one person in front of the TV, or 100.

Someone needs an active subscription to watch the show. Amazon can also track how many times the show is watched. Their 100 million viewers could be from 100 million accounts. Not being able to tell if it is 1, 2, 3, etc people watching the show just means the number could be higher then 100 million and not lower. The exception is if their in-house tracker assumes multiple people already.

We don't know if Amazon has lost hundreds of millions on the show. Season 1 had a production cost of $450 million. The rights often get lumped into Season 1 but really should be split over the stated five seasons. Without having the information on how Amazon determines "revenue" for their streaming platform we won't know if the show lost or generated money. We do know it broke all previous records for sign-ups and viewers on Prime Video.

I found "leaked" information on how Amazon views return on investment. At least in 2018. The article even has Mr. Bezos state that a golden globe win helps sells shoes. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-a...-idUSKCN1GR0FX

"The documents show that Amazon calculates a direct return on investment for each show, based on what it costs to produce versus how many Prime subscriptions it drives. For example, The Man in the High Castle cost $72 million to produce and market, but drove 1.15 million new Prime subscribers. That comes out to a cost of $63 per new Prime subscriber — which is far less than the annual Prime fee of $99. Cha-ching!"

[kenn9530]

First of all, no, 100 million viewers is not 100 million active subs. And Amazon has no way of knowing how many people actually watched the show, because you can't tell if there's one person in front of the TV, or 100. I broke that down in the post you quoted, but I guess you're not doing so well with numbers. My teaching days are behind me, so excuse me if I don't take you for a tour of basic math.

Even if you're being generous with the numbers, Amazon lost hundreds of millions of Dollars on that show so far, which they probably knew from the start. Making money was never the goal, it was broadening the audience. Unless they release sub counts from pre and post ROP, we'll not know if they achieved it. I doubt it, though.

You are unable to prove if the 100 million viewers are seperate counts or they were counted multiple times from the same accounts, you have no way on knowing how amazon counted thier viewership.

Amazon has not lost money from the show, the amazon prime subs make more than enough money to pay for the show multiple times over every single month, new shows guarantee more ppl to be subsribed to amazon prime and make them more money, if you dont constanly add new shows then many ppl leave the service until new shows come around.

[Triceron]

You are unable to prove if the 100 million viewers are seperate counts or they were counted multiple times from the same accounts, you have no way on knowing how amazon counted thier viewership.

And you don't know if they are individual accounts. It works both ways.

It's the same as trying to use the WoW sub numbers to argue whether people are subbing for Classic WoW or Modern WoW. It's a shared account, and the amount of people playing on either game doesn't reflect whether someone is subbing specifically for Classic, or just playing it because it's already folded into their account. There's no way to argue whether Classic was worth Blizzard's time and money investment into it outside of it merely bolstering subs overall.

[kenn9530]

And you don't know if they are individual accounts. It works both ways.

It's the same as trying to use the WoW sub numbers to argue whether people are subbing for Classic WoW or Modern WoW. It's a shared account, and the amount of people playing on either game doesn't reflect whether someone is subbing specifically for Classic, or just playing it because it's already folded into their account. There's no way to argue whether Classic was worth Blizzard's time and money investment into it outside of it merely bolstering subs overall.

100 million viewers in such a short time is more than most tv shows ever get, as it currently stands the 100 million viewers are seperate accounts otherwise amazon wouldnt have stated they have have had 100 million viewers so far, either way amazon prime makes so much money from the subs 1 billion dollars is barely a dent in its revenue, if it wasnt worth the money it would get cancelled.

[callipygoustp]

Believing that Amazon doesn't have accurate viewership numbers is utterly unbelievable.

Did I mention that I thought the show sucked?

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Believing that Amazon doesn't have accurate viewership numbers is utterly unbelievable.

Did I mention that I thought the show sucked?

It’s that or they are flat out lying about the numbers according to some.

What ever it takes to make the numbers lower then some want them to be.

[Triceron]

100 million viewers in such a short time is more than most tv shows ever get, as it currently stands the 100 million viewers are seperate accounts otherwise amazon wouldnt have stated they have have had 100 million viewers so far.

All you're saying is you don't know any reasons they would announce these numbers if it wasn't individual accounts. So this tells me you can't actually confirm if it actually is talking about individual accounts. You're merely assuming this, right?

Cuz we don't even know if they're talking about customers who merely watched a few episode of the series, or 100m who watched the entire series. We don't have that data. We're just assuming Amazon is giving these numbers at face value with the assumption that they're talking about individual accounts that have watched the entire series. Yet there's literally no information to actually elaborate on what metric they use to count as a viewer.

[Syegfryed]

100 million views is 100 million active subs paying to watch the content

Like people said, 100m saw from 200 total subs, it means half the péople watch it, even if its for free, that is a bad sign

the sub cost from amazon prime has made all the money back they have spent on RoP so far

Prove it, prove how they did that when they spend more thn billion on it

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Believing that Amazon doesn't have accurate viewership numbers is utterly unbelievable.

It i because they have said numbers, they are able to manipulate info in a way it looks like its favorable.

[rhorle]

Like people said, 100m saw from 200 total subs, it means half the péople watch it, even if its for free, that is a bad sign

Why is that a bad sign? Most Prime Video shows get way less and it isn't considered bad.

[Syegfryed]

Why is that a bad sign? Most Prime Video shows get way less and it isn't considered bad.

most prime video shows don't get a billion for budget

[rhorle]

most prime video shows don't get a billion for budget

Why is 50% of Amazon Prime subscribers a bad thing? Remember even 100 million Prime subscribers brings in 13.9 billion yearly with just subscription fees.

[Biomega]

Amazon has not lost money from the show, the amazon prime subs make more than enough money to pay for the show multiple times over every single month

That's not how any of this works, though. They spent $1b on the show. The fact that their prime subs make them more than $1b doesn't mean that money comes FROM THIS SHOW, because a significant number of those subs WOULD SUB EITHER WAY. Which means you'd still get that money even if you hadn't spent $1b. In order for the show to "make money", you'd need to get NEW subs that you WOULD NOT HAVE GOTTEN WITHOUT IT (or at the very least, existing subs that would have quit without it) in the amount of $1b+ total. You can't simply count subs they already had and subs they would have retained either way, because that's not money resulting from your investment; and, consequently, it can't be counted as recouping that investment either.

We don't know how many new subs they got as a result of RoP and/or how many existing subs they retained because of it. We never will. Amazon isn't going to release any useful form of those numbers, at best we'll get PR-sanitized ballparks. We also still have very little idea what they mean by "views", as they're effectively treating people who watched start to finish the exact same as people who watched 1 episode and turned it off in disgust never to return. There ARE some view-minutes numbers if you look, which give a bit of a better idea; but it's all very flimsy data to say the least. Again we'll never see actual numbers from Amazon, because those kinds of numbers are almost never released.

[Skulltaker]

Believing that Amazon doesn't have accurate viewership numbers is utterly unbelievable.

Did I mention that I thought the show sucked?

It’s that or they are flat out lying about the numbers according to some.

What ever it takes to make the numbers lower then some want them to be.

You're both kind of saying the same, so I'll reply to both of you at the same time.

First of all, no-one who is to be taken seriously claims that Amazon doesn't know how many views the show has. But views and viewers are two rather different things.

Streaming services aren't like movie tickets. With movies, you can simply tally tickets sold, and you'll have an accurate number on how many people watched your movies. With some simple surveys you can even estimate relatively accurately how many of these are people who watched the same movie twice, or more often. In the end, with minimal effort, you'll get a fairly accurate estimate of how many people your movie actually reached.

With streaming, it's different. I'm fairly certain Amazon, or any other service, can accurately track how often a show was streamed. That tells you nothing about how many people actually watched it, though. Some people watch on one device in groups, or as a couple, and so on. Taking myself as an example, I don't have a Prime account, I watched it shared with two other households. 9 People, 3 households, one prime sub.

Someone needs an active subscription to watch the show. Amazon can also track how many times the show is watched. Their 100 million viewers could be from 100 million accounts. Not being able to tell if it is 1, 2, 3, etc people watching the show just means the number could be higher then 100 million and not lower. The exception is if their in-house tracker assumes multiple people already.

We don't know if Amazon has lost hundreds of millions on the show. Season 1 had a production cost of $450 million. The rights often get lumped into Season 1 but really should be split over the stated five seasons. Without having the information on how Amazon determines "revenue" for their streaming platform we won't know if the show lost or generated money. We do know it broke all previous records for sign-ups and viewers on Prime Video.

I found "leaked" information on how Amazon views return on investment. At least in 2018. The article even has Mr. Bezos state that a golden globe win helps sells shoes. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-a...-idUSKCN1GR0FX

"The documents show that Amazon calculates a direct return on investment for each show, based on what it costs to produce versus how many Prime subscriptions it drives. For example, The Man in the High Castle cost $72 million to produce and market, but drove 1.15 million new Prime subscribers. That comes out to a cost of $63 per new Prime subscriber — which is far less than the annual Prime fee of $99. Cha-ching!"

Assuming Amazon doesn't use drones or their Alexa to accurately determine how many people are in the room when you stream something, the only thing they can accurately count are views. Did Amazon say the show got 100 million views, or 100 million viewers? The latter is significantly worse.

If it's 100 million views, that means less than 100 million prime accounts watched the show. There are probably plenty of people who actually adhere to the TOS and only use one sub for one household, but factor in that we're currently in an economic crisis and many people have to watch out with their budget, so I'm fairly confident in saying that 100 million views came from probably something like 75 million accounts. That's very generous on my part, because that would mean half of the subscribers don't share their account at all, and the others only with 1 other household. I'd not be surprised if the people who don't share their sub over more than one household are in the one digit percentile. It also doesn't take into account that there are probably some who watched the show more than once.

If the show has 100 million views, that means that the number of people who actually watched it is something like 3-4 times as many, not taking rewatches into account. I assume they're quiet negligable, anyway.

So, 75 million Prime subs watched the show, over 3 months, that's 675 million dollars, with a monthly fee of 8.99, rounded up to 9 USD. Sounds great. But how many of these are new subs? We'll never know, but if Man in the High Castle only drove 1.18 million, out of 150 million existing ones, I feel confident in saying that Rings of Power didn't drive more than 10 million new subs. It's probably drastically less, but they hyped the show quiet a bit, so, again, I'm being generous.

Suddenly, the additional revenue drops to 90 million dollars over what you'd already have, anyway. So, if Amazon hadn't made RoP, they'd have made 90 million less revenue, but would have saved a budget of... how much?

And, btw, no, you can't lump in licensing into the entire project. It's a fixed cost at the beginning without which you can't start in the first place.

If Amazon has said it's 100 million viewers, that's drastically worse. Like, really bad.

Let's do the sane thing and assume Amazon doesn't lie. If they picked 100 million viewers as the number they are comfortable to tell the public, that probably means it's the best sounding number they can publish.

While sharing accounts is strictly against the TOS, I'm fairly certain Amazon knows that A) people still do it like crazy, and B) to which extent it's done. Some easy anonymous research will tell you exactly how many people do or do not actually use one account.

If Amazon tells you 100 million people watched the show, 100 million viewers, that means that they extrapolated that data from market research and looking into how many people actually stream on one subscription. They can't know it, unless you think they're actively spying on people. Which also means that the number of Prime accounts that actually streamed Rings of Power is closer to 50 million accounts. That would only assume that, on average, 2 viewers shared the same account. Most likely, it's significantly more on average.

In either case, if you factor in all they spent on the show so far, it has lost them hundreds of millions. Which is probably something they were aware of. Which gets me to your next question.

Why is 50% of Amazon Prime subscribers a bad thing? Remember even 100 million Prime subscribers brings in 13.9 billion yearly with just subscription fees.

Yes, but they would have done so if you hadn't made ROP as well. Even if ALL Prime accounts watched the show 100 times each, if not one of them is a new sub, you have made 0 additional profit and have spent a tremendous amount of cash.

And these subscription fees are revenue. The profit is drastically less.

Since Amazon doesn't publish subscription numbers frequently, we'll probably not know how many people were actually gained as new customers. But, there are a few things we can extrapolate. For example, you said the production cost was 450 million USD for S1? You'd need a minimum of 2 months to watch the entire show every week, so a fee of 18 USD.

You'd need 25 million new subscriptions just to offset the 450 million you just sunk into the series, and that's not even taking the costs for the additional servers and their maintenance for that increased strain on your hardware into account.

And now ask yourself, do you think RoP drove 25 million new subscriptions?

Yeah, didn't think so either.

They lost hundreds of millions of dollars on that show.

[Syegfryed]

Assuming Amazon doesn't use drones or their Alexa to accurately determine how many people are in the room when you stream something, the only thing they can accurately count are views. Did Amazon say the show got 100 million views, or 100 million viewers? The latter is significantly worse.

If it's 100 million views, that means less than 100 million prime accounts watched the show. There are probably plenty of people who actually adhere to the TOS and only use one sub for one household, but factor in that we're currently in an economic crisis and many people have to watch out with their budget, so I'm fairly confident in saying that 100 million views came from probably something like 75 million accounts. That's very generous on my part, because that would mean half of the subscribers don't share their account at all, and the others only with 1 other household. I'd not be surprised if the people who don't share their sub over more than one household are in the one digit percentile. It also doesn't take into account that there are probably some who watched the show more than once.

If the show has 100 million views, that means that the number of people who actually watched it is something like 3-4 times as many, not taking rewatches into account. I assume they're quiet negligable, anyway.

So, 75 million Prime subs watched the show, over 3 months, that's 675 million dollars, with a monthly fee of 8.99, rounded up to 9 USD. Sounds great. But how many of these are new subs? We'll never know, but if Man in the High Castle only drove 1.18 million, out of 150 million existing ones, I feel confident in saying that Rings of Power didn't drive more than 10 million new subs. It's probably drastically less, but they hyped the show quiet a bit, so, again, I'm being generous.

And we hve to point out again, that 100milion views also count people who just checked the first episode and didn't watched the rest, prob why they stop talking about minutes watched.


Plus, and this is something im asking because i don't rly know, what happens if someone is watching, they close/have to log off, and come back to watch, or just f5 the page, does it count as the same view, or count as another view?

[Biomega]

Plus, and this is something im asking because i don't rly know, what happens if someone is watching, they close/have to log off, and come back to watch, or just f5 the page, does it count as the same view, or count as another view?

We don't know, because Amazon doesn't (afaik) give details like that for their metrics. For all we know they could have a rolling trailer embedded on some site and count that as "view". I'm not saying they're doing that, but it's not unheard of as a practice for pumping "viewer numbers" to look good on reports.

[Skulltaker]

And we hve to point out again, that 100milion views also count people who just checked the first episode and didn't watched the rest, prob why they stop talking about minutes watched.


Plus, and this is something im asking because i don't rly know, what happens if someone is watching, they close/have to log off, and come back to watch, or just f5 the page, does it count as the same view, or count as another view?

Well, if they said the show has X views, I'd assume they mean 'streamed from beginning to end'.

If they said X Viewers, we don't even know if they included pirated versions.

[Kumorii]

Pretty sure Amazon and Netflix and the like do check IP's and can easily see account sharing that way. They just don't cancel it even if they are against it because they know how widespread it is and that would just annihilate your customer base.
So those viewers are taken into account in the numbers I'm sure. Which means the actual accounts watching/paying is less than people viewing it.

As I mentioned before, it's all fun and games playing around with numbers and speculating, but in the end we all are missing the bigger picture because we don't have full context. To accurately gauge the success we have to know how many new subs came with the show and also how many were retained because of it. E.g someone was thinking of stopping subbing, but then they got excited for RoP and continued to be subbed. Those should also count towards RoPs success, but even more difficult to gauge except with surveys, which we don't have.

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Well, if they said the show has X views, I'd assume they mean 'streamed from beginning to end'.

If they said X Viewers, we don't even know if they included pirated versions.

Can't think of any site that uses views to mean "watching the entire thing". Views is interchangeable with traffic essentially.
Youtube for example you count has a view as soon as you clicked the video, maybe it needs a few seconds or actually going pasts ads, but you are a view almost instantly. Then you have lots of background statistics of how much people watch, which section people watch etc etc. I take views like sites use clicks to gauge traffic and "drawing" attention.

Granted this is just my interpretation, not sure how it's used exactly. Could be completely wrong.

[Syegfryed]

We don't know, because Amazon doesn't (afaik) give details like that for their metrics. For all we know they could have a rolling trailer embedded on some site and count that as "view". I'm not saying they're doing that, but it's not unheard of as a practice for pumping "viewer numbers" to look good on reports.

Well thats a thing, i talk to some people, and some online and they said they were loged-of, from their watching, so they had to click to watch again, can't verify that because i didn't watch there. But that never happened to me while watching other shows on prime.

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Well, if they said the show has X views, I'd assume they mean 'streamed from beginning to end'.

If they said X Viewers, we don't even know if they included pirated versions.

I actually think they don't count from beginning to end, cause that would for sure lower their numbers. And if it was fom piracy they numbers would increse, and how can they quantify that? That would be rly hard to do.

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Pretty sure Amazon and Netflix and the like do check IP's and can easily see account sharing that way. They just don't cancel it even if they are against it because they know how widespread it is and that would just annihilate your customer base.
So those viewers are taken into account in the numbers I'm sure. Which means the actual accounts watching/paying is less than people viewing it.

That would also boost numbers with people changing their ip or using programs to do so, we rly don't have much basis for those things;

Can't think of any site that uses views to mean "watching the entire thing". Views is interchangeable with traffic essentially.
Youtube for example you count has a view as soon as you clicked the video, maybe it needs a few seconds or actually going pasts ads, but you are a view almost instantly. Then you have lots of background statistics of how much people watch, which section people watch etc etc. I take views like sites use clicks to gauge traffic and "drawing" attention.

Granted this is just my interpretation, not sure how it's used exactly. Could be completely wrong.

I this checks out, cause some videos i click by accident there, close instantly, but they still send me related videos for recommendation