Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos acknowledged that second seasons of the streamer’s shows tend to draw less well than debut seasons. But, he said, it’s not as bad as a recently prevalent narrative would make it seem.
The streamer also touted some early results from the addition of video podcasts to the platform in its quarterly earnings report — but declined to divulge any specific numbers in a large-scale data release for the first half of the year.
The season two problem narrative was sparked by a recent Bloomberg story detailing steep viewing declines for several shows in their second seasons, among them Beef, The Four Seasons and One Piece. Sarandos didn’t dispute those findings — which came from Netflix’s own publicly released weekly top 10 lists — but said that “in aggregate, we’re not seeing any material change in our second season viewing compared to season ones. Our second seasons are performing well within our bands of expectation.”
Sarandos also said that viewing declines for the second season of a show are “very common” across the industry and offered this rationale for why it happens at Netflix: “It’s even moreso with us, because we launch our shows so big,” he said. “Our global reach, our discovery mechanism, releasing all at once — this enables us to find a very large audience early. Our shows tend to start really big, where most other places, their shows start pretty small and occasionally grow from there.”
