The Biggest 2022 Kids Content in US Streaming
What was the biggest kids streaming content in the US in 2022? Nielsen has you covered with their round-up of the year, published on their website yesterday here. Rather than drown you all with wordcount, I thought I’d try firing off a quick and dirty instalment of The Kids StreamerSphere that looks at core content performance stories. Those of you who like data fishing for yourselves can compare against 2021 here, and 2020 here. Alternatively, read on and I’ll do it for you.
Overall
CoComelon remains the performance beast we’ve all come to know. Overall viewing on Netflix actually UP from 33.3 billion minutes in 2021. The property has been present in weekly Nielsen Streaming Content Ratings for nearly two years now.
Movies
Encanto delivers an eyewatering 27.4 billion minutes viewed for Disney+, and is the only movie in the Overall Top 15. (For context, the biggest movie of 2021 was Luca with 10.6 billion.) As Nielsen SVP of Product Strategy & Thought Leadership Brian Fuhrer points out, this is the equivalent of the movie being watched over 269 million times. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s earworm of a soundtrack has to be a central facet in the replay value of this film. I guess we DO talk about Bruno…
Sticking with animation, Sing 2 is another movie worth highlighting. That 8.6 billion minutes was delivered in just over half a year on the Netflix platform. Another music lead bonanza.
Comparing year on year, Coco actually saw MORE viewing in 2022 than it did in 2021. Perhaps Hocus Pocus 2 had folks in the mood for spooky content on Disney+? Moana and Frozen were also barely down from their totals in 2021. These are going-concern franchises, without much new content spinning the wheels (none in Moana’s case). Makes me very excited for the Disney+ Original Moana series, whenever that’s due to hit.
The decay for Luca is more understandable, having come off its premiere year in 2021. Ditto to some extent for Frozen II, which was top of the charts having released in a fresh Pay 1 window in 2020. Speaking of which, in 2020, Nielsen released annual round-up data for only 30 titles (not the deeper visibility given by the 45 of 2021 and 2022). Even then we could all know how far Moana might go, coming in 2nd in 2020 across movies. Is a Lin-Manuel Miranda soundtrack the secret to streaming longevity on Disney+? We’ll need to give Encanto a few more years to see. But for Moana, you can’t deny that is some damn fine business done on a movie that’s six years old.
Series
Looking on series, and in case you didn’t already know it, Bluey is taking over the world. The series ranked 5th in acquired, which should hopefully justify that investment in the recent Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float.
Old time, comfort TV stalwarts The Simpsons and SpongeBob SquarePants also pulled in the numbers. I can’t believe The Simpsons is approaching nearly 700 episodes!
That wraps up the Nielsen 2022 headlines (for now). I’m planning a deeper look at CoComelon’s two years of glory with my friends over at What's on Netflix soon. If you’re looking for more 2022 kids content performance vibes, check out their analysis of the Netflix Trending Top 10s.
Thoughts on the above very welcome, and let me know what you think of the quick and dirty format for the newsletter.