What is the story about?
Over Thanksgiving weekend in the US, fans were tuning into the premiere of Stranger Things starring Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Finn Wolfhard, Millie
Bobby Brown, Noah Schnapp, Caleb McLaughlin, Sadie Sink, and Gaten Matarazzo. The Netflix series, co-created by Matt and Ross Duffer, returned after three years with its fifth and final season. The first four episodes have already broken the Nielsen record with the biggest weekly viewing total ever for a streaming show, with 8.46 billion viewing minutes in Season 5’s debut week. Here's why that number is significant and how it surpasses Season 4 by a country mile.
How Stranger Things Season 5 Vol 1 broke the Nielsen record
For the time period of November 24 to 30, Stranger Things recorded a massive 8.46 billion viewing minutes for the fifth season's debut week. The Nielsen’s weekly report states that the numbers are the highest ever viewing total for a streaming show ever. The show to come in second is also Stranger Things, as the fourth season recorded a billion fewer minutes. When the fourth season premiered in 2022, it accumulated 7.2 billion minutes total. Moreover, in the fourth season's first three days, around 5.14 billion minutes had been viewed.
More interesting breakdowns from the Nielsen report stated that around 57 per cent of the audience viewed the first four episodes of Season 5 and about 59 per cent of the viewers were adults between the ages of 18 and 49. While Season 4 had premiered on a Friday, the fifth season was released at an odd time. It premiered at 5 pm PT on a Wednesday right in the middle of holiday season for most of America. Additionally, seven episodes of the fourth season had premiered, while only four from the fifth were released in the first batch in November.
Even before the show came out, audiences were rewatching previous seasons to recap. In the weeks prior to its release, it resurfaced in the Nielsen Top 10, rising to number one with 1.6 billion minutes the week before the fifth season premiere. The remaining four episodes are set to release on Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve in the US, and it remains to be seen how the numbers can still rise for the final season.
