Do streaming services follow the 80/20 rule?
Like, do 20% of watchers account for 80% of all viewing minutes?
It’s Ye Olde Pareto Principle. In 1906, Vilfredo Pareto (the ultimate Italian Renaissance Man) noted that 80% of the land (and wealth) in Italy was owned by only 20% of the population.
(This is different from the Pleasure Principle, which Janet Jackson discovered in 1986 on her 5X-platinum album Control.)
Well, Julien Normand from Publicis Media crunched some GWI data to see. GWI gathered streaming info from thousands of people in a dozen countries around the world. While their data weren’t always precisely on the 20% line, with a little bit of Julien's estimation, plus a little bit more of my own guesstimation, we’ve got a reasonable sense of how much stuff the world’s couch potatoes are watching.
Turns out the average is far less than 80/20: it’s more like 50/20.
From the USA on the heavy end (56%) to the UK at the light end (43%), to India as the crazy outlier (11%), the heaviest bingewatchers are only watching about half of all minutes watched.
There are three really interesting things about this:
We assume it’s 80/20, partly because some other things are, and partly because it just feeeeels nice. It adds to 100 so cleanly!
This means that HALF the viewing minutes are being watched by “light watchers.” You know: they’re still not done The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (hurry up! It’s soooo good.)
This is a similar pattern seen in most grocery (aka CPG aka FMCG) categories & brands like detergent & shampoo.
Caveats, of course: numbers were estimated, and things will vary a little bit by country, region, technology, etc.
Nonetheless, it seems like a broad, consistent pattern that’s even consistent with a lot of other consumer behavior.
Some lessons for you:
🔸Check your own category & brand for the actual Pareto breakdown.
🔸Your brand’s sales might depend a lot more on light buyers than you think.
🔸Don’t assume that couch potatoes (or heavy buyers in your case) are always sedentary: over time, a lot of those heavies will become light (and a few lights might become heavy).