Nielsen has finally released data for early June, which means we now have data for The Acolyte. Luminate has its own streaming chart, so it will be interesting to see how the two compare. What did Nelson say about the Acolytes? Click to view it!
No clothes on this show!
First, Nielsen usually releases their data on Thursday or Friday, why they are now releasing these data on Tuesday is unclear.
Before I give you these numbers, I have to point out again that Luminate and Nielsen’s numbers are not that easy to compare!
Luminate measures viewership between Friday and Thursday. Nelson does this Monday through Sunday. This means Nielsen should be reporting higher sales for “The Acolyte” for at least the first few weeks, since “The Acolyte” was only released for two days (Wednesday and Thursday) on the Luminate chart with its Tuesday night premiere. However, Nielsen also adds numbers for all weekends, namely Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
This is ruled out:
“The Acolyte” ranked seventh on the initial streaming charts and did not crack the overall top 10, with 488 million viewing minutes in its first week.
By comparison, Luminate reports 210 million minutes, but as I mentioned, The Acolyte also has Friday, Saturday and Sunday to draw viewers on the Nielsen charts, and Luminate only collects viewership data through Thursday , all data after that are already the second week of data on the Luminate rankings. Therefore, it was inevitable that Luminate would report lower ratings for The Acolyte in its first week. Acolyte” dropped off the Luminate charts last week, so we have episode 6 without firm numbers.
Ahsoka aired two episodes in its first week, totaling 829 million minutes.
If I divide the minutes watched by the running time, we get this:
Acolyte: 6.26 million views
Ahsoka: 8.55 million views
Andorra: 5.43 million views
Everything else had much higher numbers in the first week.
If you’ve read my streaming charts article before, you’ll know that shows that release multiple episodes in their first week usually have lower average ratings (number of views) because obviously not everyone watches all the episodes at once. Andor in particular, with a run time of nearly 2 hours, suffered. Subsequent episodes had much higher views.
Regardless, as we can see, The Acolyte is pretty much ahead of Andor, even though it aired three episodes at the same time (which means more people may have watched some episodes at a later time), “Acolyte” had a 27% lower rating than Ahsoka. It’s important to point out again that Lucasfilm thought it was smart to spend $180 million on this show.
It will be interesting to see whether “Acolyte” can stay ahead of Andor on the Nielsen charts in the coming weeks, and whether it eventually bows out and whether more episodes are included.
Now with both Nielsen and Luminate streaming rankings in hand, we can safely say that Tracker not only didn’t do well in the ratings, it was a ratings disappointment. It had 6.26 million views, not even 1/3 of The Mandalorian’s ratings. That means 2/3 of potential viewers flat out said “no” and didn’t even bother to at least check out the first episode.
If Lucasfilm was trying to find a new audience with “Acolyte,” it failed. Or at best they found a new audience at the expense of the majority of old fans who weren’t interested. Regardless, “Acolyte” is the second-least-watched “Star Wars” premiere on Disney+ to date. This is an indisputable fact, no matter what some other media outlets try to tell people.
Nielsen Streaming Chart
