The Ratings era is over. Know which shows drive Subscribers.

The age of “how many people watched the Super Bowl” is over. Introducing... Antenna Subscriber Views.

In the cable TV age, the primary unit of measurement was the TV Ratings Point. It was (and still is) a financial metric that estimated how many people watched a show so that advertisers would have a way to know if they reached who they paid for. This worked well because it was aligned with the economic model: higher ratings = more money.

• Advertising was a simple price x volume equation. All else equal, the larger the audience, the more revenue.

• Even Carriage Fees were largely tied to scale.

By all accounts, the media companies’ job was simple: get more eyeballs, as measured by ratings, and you will make more money.

But that era is gone. Yet we’re still clinging to ratings as the primary measure of success. What changed? The economic model shifted its focus from large audiences to customer lifetime value.

Whereas amassing a large audience was the name of the linear game, streaming works when you can get the same user to continue to pay you for the long term. Since you’re on the hook for customer acquisition cost, and you’re only charging a user about $15 per month, it does not work if that user constantly churns out.

Let’s look at a quick example:

Doing things that will quickly amass audiences can backfire if those audiences aren’t engaged and don’t stick around. Since the entry price is much lower than the cost to acquire a user, the streaming game is to acquire, engage, retain, monetize, and win back your users.

Even as virtually all major streaming platforms have adopted ad-supported models, the industry still must move beyond traditional ratings as the go-to metric for evaluating performance. After all, if you can’t reliably acquire, engage, and retain your subscribers, there are no users to advertise to. This problem can no longer be fully outsourced to cable companies to solve.

Modern consumer subscription services, of which video streaming services are some of the largest, have all accepted this approach. They don’t try to acquire the largest audience possible; instead, they focus on acquiring subscribers they can engage, retain, and monetize. They use their first-party data in sophisticated ways to do this.

But video streaming is an extremely dynamic, competitive market. Your users’ behavior is dramatically impacted by what they’re doing elsewhere — and first-party data is completely blind to that. And when it comes to understanding their place in the market, such that they can better engage users, all that sophistication breaks down. The video streamers revert to the old world of ratings. They don’t have much choice.

So the game has changed, but the measure of success hasn’t. That’s why we’re launching Antenna Subscriber Views this week. Our mission is to fill the gaps in understanding what your users are doing elsewhere, so you can make better decisions. Antenna’s Subscriber Metrics offering does exactly that when it comes to subscription KPIs. And with Subscriber Views, we’re going even further, by connecting viewership behavior to acquisition, retention, and engagement. The creatives who make, fund, and distribute the amazing programming we love need this data to ensure they are building healthy subscriber bases that will continue to fund the programming for years to come.

Data in action

Example #1: Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight on Netflix (November 2024)

It was reported that over 100 million people around the globe watched this fight. I guess that’s good… but the real questions are:

How many people signed up for Netflix to watch it? Antenna estimates that 23% of Netflix Sign-ups (over 600K households) went on to watch the fight in their first month of subscribing

Did they stick around and keep subscribing to Netflix? Antenna estimates that 86% of Sign-ups who watched Paul vs. Tyson were still Subscribed at the end of the following month, 1 percentage point above the average Netflix Sign-up.

What kept them engaged? 16% of Paul vs. Tyson viewers also watched Rebel Ridge on Netflix, 1.4x more likely than the average Netflix viewer.

These are the questions asked by a service that is optimizing for customer lifetime value — a service that is making programming decisions to keep its users engaged, rather than just to generate large vanity metrics.

Example #2: Severance on Apple TV+ (January 2025)

It was reported that 6.4 billion minutes were spent streaming Severance… but, once again, the real questions to ask are:

Did Severance uniquely drive new sign-ups for Apple TV+? 34% of Apple TV+ Sign-ups in January (almost 1M households) viewed Severance, more than twice as many as Silo, the next largest title on Apple TV+ in January

Which segment of Apple TV+’s subscribers did the show uniquely tap into? Loyal Apple TV+ Subscribers were even more likely to tune-in to watch Severance than new Sign-ups, with 52% of Loyal Subscribers watching Severance in January 2025.

Did it create high, sustained engagement amongst Apple TV+ subscribers? Those who watched Severance, as opposed to any other show on Apple TV, were 3.5X more likely to be Weekly Active Users of Apple TV+ in the Severance premiere window — and that engagement remained elevated for months following premiere.

These are the questions that sophisticated subscription operators would ask as they’re trying to build a programming schedule that engages various segments in their user base — a service that is thinking about how to build the best offering for each unique group of subscribers in its user base.

I could go on, but I think you get the point, and you’ll have to message me for a demo for more 😉. The point is clear: how many people watched a title does not answer any of the strategic questions that streamers need to answer to better do their job of acquiring, engaging, retaining, and winning back high customer lifetime value users. It does not help them build better businesses. It does not help them entertain, inspire, and empower the world.

How we are doing this

We’ve built Antenna Subscriber Views on four core methodology pillars:

1. Privacy-first big data: We are observing the behavior of millions of users. This not only minimizes issues with bias but also allows for fine-grained segmentation in a way that old-school survey methodologies do not.

2. Real viewership: When we report viewership, we mean viewership, not an incomplete or unrepresentative proxy for it. This builds trust that we aren’t making claims that we shouldn’t be.

3. Connected to subscription behavior: Everything Antenna reports on will connect directly to acquisition, retention, and engagement. We believe our job is to help our clients build better businesses, and without tying viewership to lifetime value, the data is little more than a vanity metric.

4. Modern AI-first methodology: Duh! We’re 1,000 words into this post and this is the first mention of AI. You’re welcome 🙃. In all seriousness, AI methodologies from machine learning (used to create predictive models to connect viewership information with subscriber profiles) to generative AI (to create rich, accurate, real-time metadata) are on full display in Subscriber Views.

Why this matters

Antenna’s mission is to expand knowledge of subscriber behavior so brands can entertain, inspire, and empower the world. We truly believe that what we’re doing plays a role in creating a better media & entertainment environment. Six years later, it’s still day one. Building a better media ecosystem begins with building a business model that works.

This problem is near & dear to my heart. When I entered the world of digital media 10 years ago, it was still primarily a creative business. And it still is; though through data, we’re better able to understand audiences than ever before. This data revolution was one of the key technologies that allowed for the streaming revolution. Without the data, it would be much harder for a consumer subscription to function. At Axios, as one of the first “Heads of Growth” in the industry, we pioneered the use of new metrics, eventually bringing the full subscription toolkit to bear. I’ve spent the majority of my career to date trying to get media brands to adopt this data-informed approach — and I feel like we’re on the cusp of the largest impact yet.