Netflix struggles to retain viewers after a series' first season

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**Megan McCarty-Corino** (1:25)
Live by the binge, die by the binge. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino.
Netflix may be the undisputed king of streaming, but it's facing a new challenge, the so-called sophomore slump. Internal data reported by Bloomberg News show audiences dropping off dramatically for follow-up seasons of successful shows. Series like The Night Agent, Beef, and Avatar The Last Airbender all lost 50% or more of their original viewers when they returned for season two.
To figure out what might be going on and how Netflix could respond, we called up Brandon Katz. He's the Director of Insights and Content Strategy at Greenlight Analytics.

**Brandon Katz** (2:23)
Season ones typically can attract a broad pool of people who at least want to sample what's new. Season two typically only gets the people who actually stuck around. Now, that's not the concrete rule every single time, but generally speaking, that's how it goes. And curiosity isn't loyalty. Netflix is incredibly good at getting people to press play. Their homepage is the most valuable real estate in all of Hollywood. But the harder, broader challenge is getting people to finish a season and then come back two years later, because there's a big difference between initial curiosity and attention and long-term fandom.

**Megan McCarty-Corino** (3:01)
Okay, you said two years later. It seems like Netflix takes a really long time to bring new seasons back to the platform. Why does it take so long?

**Brandon Katz** (3:11)
Well, often these are massively expensive, highly scaled shows that simply take a very long time. Sometimes due to the binge release model and the way Netflix approaches business, they will order a first season, it'll be a hit and they won't necessarily be immediately ready to turn around production on a season two. But I do think for a lot of big splashy Netflix dramas, these two to three year waits are really weighing on the patience and fandom of viewers who just may not care by the time their next installment finally arrives.

**Megan McCarty-Corino** (3:44)
I wonder if one of the reasons they may not care is the loose tethering that people may have due to the binge model, which is the whole attraction of Netflix. But could that be harming viewer engagement?

**Brandon Katz** (4:01)
I do believe that there is a time and a place for the binge model, and there's a time and a place for the batched release, and there's a time and a place for weekly releases. I think a lot of data will show you that first seasons of new concepts are usually benefiting from the binge model, and then if there are hits, it can be very beneficial to switch to a more batched or weekly release. I also think there's more than enough evidence to prove that weekly releases keep engagement higher for longer, and it allows you to build that viewership time over time. I think season two of Landman on Paramount Plus and season two of The Pit on HBO Max are the two most crystal clear examples recently of two shows that were very popular start and then grew very massive in their second seasons and had large episode counts play out week over week. So it built excitement, it built conversation and likely stayed more fresh top of mind by the time both second seasons rolled around, which was again, a year later, not two, three years. So I know as a proud couch potato myself, I will binge a show I'm highly excited for in about 48 hours and forget everything that happened by the time the next season comes around.