The Nielsen Streaming Charts For The Acolyte - Week 1

Nielsen have finally released their numbers for early June, which means we now have numbers for The Acolyte. Luminate have their own streaming charts so it will be interesting to see how the two compare. What does Nielsen say about The Acolyte? Click through to find out!

This show is wearing no clothes!

First, Nielsen usually released their numbers on a Thursday or Friday, why they release them on a Tuesday now is unknown.

And before I give you the numbers I have to point out once more that Luminate and Nielsen numbers are not all that easily comparable!

Luminate measures viewership between Friday – Thursday. Nielsen does so from Monday – Sunday. Which means Nielsen should, at least in the first few weeks, report higher numbers for The Acolyte, because on the Luminate charts The Acolyte was only released for two days (Wednesday and Thursday) and Tuesday night when it premiered. Nielsen however also adds all the weekend numbers, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

With that out of the way:

The Acolyte is a pretty underwhelming #7 on the original streaming charts, not in the overall top 10 and has a week 1 viewership of 488 million minutes.

In comparison Luminate reported 210 million minutes, but as I mentioned, on the Nielsen charts The Acolyte also had Friday, Saturday and Sunday to gain viewers, Luminate only collected viewership data until Thursday, everything after that is already week 2 data on the Luminate charts. So it’s inevitable Luminate would report lower numbers for The Acolyte in week 1. It will be interesting to see how total minutes watched across the season will compare… but unfortunately (or not) The Acolyte dropped out of the Luminate charts last week so we have no exact data for episode 6. Only rough estimates (it must be lower than the #10 entry).

Ahsoka had 829 million minutes with two episodes in week 1.

If I divide viewing minutes by runtime we get the following:

The Acolyte: 6.26 million views
Ahsoka: 8.55 million views
Andor: 5.43 million views

Everything else had much higher numbers in week 1.

If you read my streaming charts articles before you will know that shows that release more than one episode in the first week usually have somewhat lower average ratings (views) because apparently not all people watch all the episodes in one go. Especially Andor with its almost 2 hour runtime was affected. Views for subsequent episodes were much higher.

Anyway, as we can see The Acolyte is barely ahead of Andor, even though that had three episodes out at the same time (meaning, more people may have watched some of the episodes at a later time) and The Acolyte has a 27% lower viewership than Ahsoka. It has to be pointed out again that Lucasfilm deemed it wise to spend 180 million on the show.

It will be interesting to see if The Acolyte can stay ahead of Andor on the Nielsen charts in the coming weeks and if it will drop out eventually as well as more episodes are included.

With now two streaming charts, Nielsen and Luminate,  we can say with certainty that The Acolyte is not only not a ratings hit, it’s a ratings disappointment. With 6.26 million views it doesn’t even have 1/3 of The Mandalorian’s viewership. Meaning 2/3 of the potential audience said categorically  “no” and didn’t even bother to at least check out the first episode.

If Lucasfilm tried to find new audiences with The Acolyte it failed. Or at best the new audience they did find came at the expense of a majority of legacy fans who have no interest in this. Either way, The Acolyte is the 2nd least watched  Star Wars premiere on Disney+ yet. And this is undisputable fact, regardless of what some other media outlets out there try to tell people.

The Nielsen Streaming Charts

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