Image: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Amazon Prime Video
On Monday the 17thof September, the Primetime Emmy awards were televised in the U.S. The big news of the night was the success of Amazon Prime Video’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which won 5 awards, the most of any show. The awards it won include Outstanding Comedy, making Amazon the first streaming service to win this award. Congratulations!
Following on from our previous analysis of the Emmy nominations, now that the winners are known, we will take a closer look at the performance of the streamers at the Primetime Emmys.
Demand increases for the digital original shows that won a Primetime Emmy
In total, five Digital Original titles won Emmys: Although Hulu was nominated, only Netflix and Amazon had shows that took home an award. To demonstrate the impact of winning an award on the shows that won, the following chart shows the percentage jump in US demand the day after the Monday night award ceremony.
The biggest percentage increase was 560% for the Netflix limited series Seven Seconds, for which Regina King won Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series. This show also had the biggest absolute increase, gaining over 11.5 million Demand Expressions from Monday to Tuesday as intrigued audiences checked out this relatively unknown show.
As mentioned earlier,The Marvelous Mrs. Maiselwon 5 Emmys in total. As well as Outstanding Comedy, the show also took both Outstanding Comedy Actress, Outstanding Supporting Comedy Actress, Comedy Writing and Comedy Directing. Likely as a consequence of this dominating sweep of the Comedy awards, demand for the show rose by 222%. As The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel was fairly well known before the Emmys, this is a much smaller percentage rise than Seven Seconds, yet significantly, represent a comparable absolute rise of 11.1 million Demand Expressions.
Close behind the Amazon show is Netflix’s The Crown, which received the Outstanding Drama Actress Emmy for Claire Foy. Demand for The Crown rose by 216% the day after its award victory.
Netflix also enjoyed a 149% rise in demand for Godless, after that title swept both Supporting Actor & Actress in a Limited Series.
The final Digital Original to win a Primetime Emmy is Black Mirror, which won Outstanding TV Movie for the episode USS Callister. Demand for Black Mirror rose 129% after the win.
Comparing demand and stock changes for Netflix and Amazon over the awards
While winning an Emmy undoubtedly has many benefits for the streaming services, one of the most immediate was that the stock of both Netflix and Amazon rose after the awards.
Clearly our caveat here is that the market is pricing in a plethora of information into the day’s closing stock – with the information coming out of the Emmys only being one of many other factors. Furthermore, at least in Amazon’s case, the market currently has no way to assess the stand-alone performance of the company’s streaming division. Therefore, this exercise is simple a bit of “fun with numbers”, but nevertheless offers up some interesting context for further commentary.
With this in mind, let’s get started. The following chart compares the demand for all originals (not just those that won or were nominated for an Emmy) from Amazon and Netflix to the share price of each company over the days around the Primetime Emmy awards. Note that stock movement is zero over the 15th and 16th as markets are closed over weekends.
On this chart, we observe that the demand for Netflix’s original shows and the Netflix stock movements are very closely correlated over the days around the awards. On the day after the awards ceremony, the demand for Netflix original titles rose by 4.68% while the Netflix share price rose 4.94%.
However, we see that the correlation is not as close for Amazon; demand for Amazon original series increased at a much higher rate than Amazon stock. While after the Emmys Amazon’s stock rose by 1.73%, demand for Amazon’s originals rose by 19.37%.
These observations become more important when the nature of each company is taken into account: While content is Netflix’s sole business, it is only one part of Amazon’s many business areas. Therefore, while both companies did well at the Emmys, the awards success is much more critical to Netflix than it is to Amazon. Note: If you found this analysis interesting you may also review an older piece published in Quartz, titled “There’s a correlation between Netflix’s fantastic originals shows and its rising share price“.
For more information, reach out to Parrot Analytics for a live demonstration of our Demand Portal, or watch our latest product video.
The data in this article are based on Demand Expressions (DEX). DEX is the globally standardized TV measurement metric developed by Parrot Analytics, which represents the total audience demand being expressed for a title, within a market. Audience demand reflects the desire, engagement and viewership, weighted by importance; so a stream/download is a higher expression of demand than a ‘like’/comment.
