‘Ahsoka’ Third-Party Viewership Numbers for the Premiere are Lower than ‘The Mandalorian’ Season 3’s
With the release of any new Star Wars series (or big streaming show, for that matter), there always come the much-dreaded preliminary viewership numbers, and Ahsoka is no different. As usual, there are a lot of misconceptions around these numbers so we’ll do our best here to explain where they come from and why they are not the end-all-be-all that social media may make them out to be.
The company Samba TV revealed on Monday that they measured 1.2M households watched Ahsoka over its first six days of release in the United States, which represents a 25% decline from the viewership that The Mandalorian season 3’s premiere had (1.6M) and a 29% decline from The Book of Boba Fett‘s (1.7M). Note that the number provided for The Mandalorian was actually for a five-day window, but the truth is that Ahsoka being “six days” is kind of untrue — though they didn’t specify so, we assume they count the three-to-six hours the show had on Tuesday evening as a full day, and that the six-day window includes Tuesday-Sunday. So, in the end, we’re probably comparing tomatoes with tomatoes. To add to this, Deadline reported the same number on a five-day window.
But what does this number actually mean? There are many different answers to this question, so bear with us for a second. In their data-taking process, Samba TV tracks the viewership behavior of three million households across the United States out of a much larger sample. So this doesn’t mean that only 1.2 million people watched Ahsoka in the United States; it means that, of the 3M TV devices that Samba TV tracked over the past week, 1.2M of them tuned into the first two episodes of Ahsoka. Obviously, this is a rather limited subsample of the entirety of North American television devices, not to mention all possible devices where people can watch Disney Plus, not to mention all the possible territories the platform is available in. So why do we even care about it?
It’s very hard for us to take a peek behind the curtain at any streaming numbers, and as a consequence, it’s very tempting to go with whatever number anyone holds in front of us. We’ve stated before that Nielsen, albeit still unreliable, is usually the best indicator of how well a show is performing. However, Nielsen doesn’t reveal their numbers until four weeks later, which makes Samba TV’s numbers all the more appealing while the Ahsoka iron is hot; moreover, Nielsen also tracks almost 100x fewer households. But even Nielsen is hard to interpret at times, since they measure the total of hours watched of a particular show during a week, not a specific episode. Taking that into account, though, Nielsen and Samba TV measured a similar drop in viewership between the season 2 and 3 premieres of The Mandalorian (between 20% and 23%), so we’ll give the latter the benefit of the doubt.
So what do we make of this number? Well, it’s a bit of a mixed bag and it all depends on what Disney Plus was expecting. Were they anticipating Mandalorian-like numbers for a show that doesn’t feature an adorable puppet and is, in turn, centered around a character most people barely remember from the other live-action shows? Or were they expecting that social media buzz and showing off plenty of lightsaber action in the trailers would be enough to carry them to Mandalorian levels of success? It’s hard to tell, but if anything else, this probably means that there is a decline of interest in Star Wars, which isn’t great news for Disney now that they want to double down on IPs and go back to theaters with a galaxy far, far away.
However, the buzz seems to be overall positive for now, and this could be a case where word of mouth keeps the show alive and more and more people tune into it over the next few weeks. There is also the argument to be made about people tuning out because they haven’t seen Star Wars: Rebels, but honestly, how many people log into Disney Plus, see that there is a new Star Wars show called Ahsoka, and decide not to check it out because they haven’t seen an animated series they likely haven’t even heard about? The truth is that they’ll probably watch it because they saw an ad on a bus, or a quick promo on TV while they were watching sports, or browsing through TikTok. They will ask their Star Wars nerd friend or even Google what it is about, and they will tell them about Rebels. But if the show looks appealing enough to them, not having watched Rebels is not exactly a turn-off, especially in a world where the “Everything You Should Know About” videos/articles are the go-to for people who don’t have the time nor the energy to catch up with everything that is out there.
Unfortunately, going off of third-party services is all we can do while the streamers keep holding their viewership numbers under lock and key. And that makes for rather thin analyses. We’ll revisit these numbers once the season has concluded and Nielsen has disclosed the hours watched for all seven weeks that Ahsoka is on the air. Until then, make sure to check back every Wednesday as we discuss the latest episode of Ahsoka; you can check out my own discussion on Parts One and Two here.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
