Lucifer, a drama that debuted on Fox before moving to Netflix in 2018, topped Nielsen's list of the most-streamed original programs in the United States in 2021.
According to the measuring firm's year-end analysis, the series' 93 episodes garnered more than 18.3 billion minutes of streaming during the year. That put it significantly ahead of Squid Game's 16.4 billion, although in 2021, Netflix only had nine episodes of the Korean phenomenon. According to Nielsen, U.S. viewers of the Korean-language, subtitled version accounted for around 15% of total viewership, with the balance watching the English-dubbed version.
Last September, Netflix released the sixth and final season of Lucifer. Warner Bros. Television collaborated with Jerry Bruckheimer Television to develop the show.
Netflix set a precedent by rescuing the show after Fox canceled it, which it has periodically followed with other purchased projects that become popular on its platform. (Former NBC drama Manifest, which racked up nearly 20 billion viewing minutes in just 42 episodes last year, is a notable example.) Decisions about continuing a show under Netflix's auspices are complicated by traditional production firms' normal method of selling global territories piecemeal. For example, in the United Kingdom, Fox had sold the rights to Lucifer to Amazon's Prime Video; the show had just finished its run on Prime there last year.
Netflix has, of course, begun producing its own top ten programming lists in all of its international markets. Lucifer, it turns out, did not play a significant impact in those rankings because just the most recent season was considered.
Three non-Netflix shows reached the originals chart: Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale, Apple TV+'s Ted Lasso, and Disney+'s Wandavision. The latter two performances, according to Nielsen, were at a distinct disadvantage due to their half-hour running times.
Luca took the top spot on the box office chart, with 10.6 billion minutes of viewing. Last summer, the charming, well-received Pixar film was released exclusively on Disney+, bypassing the theaters. That distribution method, which has surely helped streaming numbers, has recently been adopted with Pixar movies such as Soul and will be for Turning Red, which will be released in March.
Despite investing substantially on original movies and beginning to publicize the idea that it is releasing at least one blockbuster picture each week, Netflix only has three of the top 15 titles in the movie rankings, with Raya and the Last Dragon, a 2021 release, joining library mainstays Moana and Frozen II. Amazon, whose Prime Video service also spent a lot of money on movies, only had one film on the list, The Tomorrow War. Notably, Prime Video occupied only two of the 45 overall spots in the Nielsen rankings.
Netflix, on the other hand, has undisputed supremacy in the acquired programming area. Long-running network favorites tend to top the rankings of acquired programs due to Nielsen's methodology — assessing the sheer tonnage of minutes seen, which favors titles with more episodes — which favors titles with more episodes. So it was in 2021, when former CBS hit Criminal Minds was resurrected (whose audience on Netflix is actually younger than its old-skewing onetime home would suggest).
Criminal Minds thrived on volume, with 322 episodes helping to keep the wheels running steadily with a little less than 33.9 billion minutes of viewership. The procedural's 15th season concluded with a series finale that aired last year.
With only 15 episodes, preschool sensation CoComelon came close to taking the top rank, clocking in at over 33.3 billion minutes. Moonbug Entertainment, the show's production company, made headlines in 2021 when it was purchased for $3 billion by Blackstone-backed Candle Media.
In total, Netflix claimed 14 of the top 15 acquired titles, with Seinfeld, which shifted over from Hulu, being the lone shared title.
Nielsen only counts viewing on a TV screen when computing the streaming rankings, thus mobile viewing isn't included. To date, the only providers being frequently tracked are Disney, Hulu, Prime Video, Apple TV+, and Netflix, so there's no indication of viewership of Friends on HBO Max or Yellowstone on Peacock.
Despite the gaps, and the lack of mobile statistics distorting the image for some titles with a younger audience, the Nielsen metric is the most reliable third-party data on streaming currently available. It's unclear how much raw and consistent data, akin to traditional linear ratings or box office receipts, will come from the still-growing services. So yet, not much has changed.
