How Much Interest is There in Rings of Power?

Intriguing question.

Amazon is claiming they are mopping the floor with everyone thanks to their Tolkien fan fiction. Particularly HBOmax’s House of the Dragon.

But are they?

Well, there is no question of this if you ask the shill media. Variety and Hollywood Reporter were positively crowing over numbers that Amazon released that proved. PROVED mind you that more people saw The Rings of Power than the House of the Dragon.

Except they didn’t prove anything of the kind. If these numbers proved anything, it is how complicated the viewer landscape has gotten.

In terms of direct streaming Rings of Power probably did beat House of the Dragon. But it only did so for one big reason, Unlike Rings of Power, House of the Dragon is on cable television. Good old-fashioned on-cable HBO is very much alive and still in business. It accounts for better than half of HBO’s viewership Figure in those numbers and… well honestly I’m not sure what they would prove. You can measure how many TVs watched an hour-long cable TV show that began and ended at a specific time.

What you have a lot more trouble measuring is the viewership of a streaming exclusive that can be started at any time, paused at any time, and for any amount of time. At one point do you assume a viewer isn’t coming back? This says nothing about people who have been trained to binge-watch and are waiting for a season to end so they can gorge on it.

On top of that Amazon and Google have clamped down hard on this data. Samba won’t release it’s numbers for free anymore and Neilson is always four weeks behind reality these days.

So, what can you measure?

Search questions.

As a measure of public interest, it’s pretty flawed but that said, it is a general reflection of it.

So let us take a quick look.

This google trends search begins 30 days out.

The line in Blue is House of the Dragon (autofill once I started typing)

The Red is Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (autofill once I started typing)

And as a control, the yellow line is simply “Lord of the Rings” (Custom search, no autofill accepted)

The first graph is the 90-day metric

The second is the 30-day metric.

Well good for the Rings of Power.

As you can see for yourself, It has revived interest in The Lord of the Rings.

And in other commercial success news, Overwatch 2 has scored a 1.2 on Metacritic.

Okay, I’m done here.

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