The most popular TV shows this year (so far)

As we enter the second half of 2022, YouGov has been measuring the online appetite for TV shows across popular streaming platforms during the first half of the year – looking specifically at figures from the US, Germany and the UK.

The data comes from YouGov Signal, a social listening tool that tracks the performance of TV programs, movies and brands, and uses a show’s Appetite Score in each market to determine the top shows available on each of the three streaming platforms.

Appetite Score is an indexed value between 0 (worst) and 100 (best) taking the average of publicly available social and digital data for a title. The specific components aggregated to determine a title’s Appetite Score include:

• Indexed search volume or the relative value of daily online searches for a specific title
• Wikipedia page views or the daily number of views a specific title’s Wikipedia page receives
• Torrent downloads or the number of times a title has been illegally downloaded
• Instagram engagements or the number of likes and comments on a title’s owned Instagram posts

The top shows of the first half of 2022 by platform

US

In the US, Star Wars spinoff The Mandalorian (98.41) from Disney+ topped all shows in terms of Appetite Score. The Book of Boba Fett (Appetite Score of 97.7) and Moon Knight (97.38) also rank highly for Disney+ among US consumers.

The top Netflix show in the US based on YouGov Signal’s engagement data was The Last Kingdom (97.3), followed by Stranger Things (95.97) and Lucifer (95.86). Reacher (96.13), The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (92.19) and The Boys (91.34) top the list of shows from Amazon Prime Video during this time period.

UK

In the UK, Ozark topped all other TV titles across major platforms during this period. On Netflix, the next most popular shows were The Witcher (97.98) and Stranger Things (97.78). Outlander (96.38) was the top ranked show from Prime Video followed by Reacher (94.94) and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (93.01). The top streaming shows in the UK for Disney+ include Hawkeye (94.31), Only Murders in the Building (94.15) and Dopesick (92.09).

Germany

Money Heist earned the top spot for Netflix in Germany across all platforms. The streamer’s next most popular shows were The Witcher (97.43) Lucifer (96.79) and Sex Education (95.54). The Expanse (90) was the highest-ranking title for Amazon Prime Video and Hawkeye (88.9) led the list for Disney+ in Germany.

Exploring audience opportunities and brand affinities

YouGov Signal tracks over 8,500 entities across TV, actors, movies and brands with the ability to correlate audience affinities.

Zooming into viewers of The Mandalorian, the top show in the US in the first half of 2022, Signal data reveals that the show’s American audience is comprised mainly of US adults aged 30-44 (68%) followed by those aged 45-54 (14%) and young adults aged 18-29 (13%). Disney’s sci-fi show also tends to attract more men (73%) than women (27%) when examining the show’s overall audience makeup.

The Mandalorian’s US audience also over-index in their affinity for brands such as DIsney+ (unsurprisingly), The LEGO Store, HBO Max and imdb.com. Game brands resonate strongly with this group, especially Xbox, and games such as such as Halo, God of War and Bloodborne.

Signal also tracks the sentiment of conversations around a brand. For example, the data shows that 71% of the conversations occurring around The Expanse in Germany are positive. Almost a fifth (21%) of the conversations are neutral in sentiment and roughly 8% are negative.

Regarding the brands they like, The Expanse’s German audience over- index in their affinity for brands such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Twitter, YouTube, Disney+ and Amazon Prime.

They also tend to prefer sci-fi shows similar to The Expanse and the audience shows a strong affinity for The Book of Boba Fett, Star Trek: Picard, the Mandalorian, The Witcher, and Stranger Things.

See where your brand ranks among audiences of specific TV and movie titles across the world