(The following is a story about Netflix “ratings,” so find a grain or two of salt before reading any further.)
Netflix’s Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, it appears, is a big hit for the streaming service. Leading Netflix projection house Symphony Advanced Media, which has been leaking numbers on the streamer for more than a year, said in a Thursday release that nearly 5 million viewers between the ages of 18 and 49 have watched all four episodes of the revival.
By regular broadcast standards, that amounts to a 3.6 rating among adults 18-49. It should be emphasized that group, the key advertising demo for conventional series, is irrelevant to the ad-free Netflix, but it represents a large and appealing portion of the TV audience. Compared with other 2016 Netflix efforts, Gilmore Girls‘ binge audience in the first three-day window is only outmeasured by Orange Is the New Black‘s fourth season (5.8 million) and the first run of Fuller House (7.3 million).
A vast majority of those who watched the first episode also tuned in for the entire run. Just shy of 6 million adults 18-49 watched the premiere in the live-plus-three-day window, and 83 percent of those viewers went on to watch the whole thing.
As sampling goes, Gilmore Girls did rank lower — outperformed by both Fuller House and Orange Is the New Black, as well as Marvel efforts Luke Cage and Daredevil. But it appears to be a hit.
Symphony’s numbers, which even the group calls out as preliminary, are not recognized by Netflix. The streamer is famously secretive about the number of subscribers who watch its individual original series. Symphony extrapolates its ratings based off a group who use their phones to monitor their TV viewing habits. Its panel size, according to the company website, presently consists of 15,000 individuals.
