With U.S. content’s contraction over the last few years, success in the streaming TV game is no longer about sheer volume but rather how platforms cultivate and sustain audience relationships with series over time.
Indeed, viewership patterns at Netflix help to illustrate this point, as the streamer has maintained a robust output level in the post-peak TV era (still more than doubling its nearest rival, Prime Video, in U.S. series last year). But Netflix’s dominant franchises frequently show season-over-season declines in minutes watched, according to an analysis of Luminate’s Streaming Viewership (M) data.
When examining season-to-season changes in U.S. minutes watched during titles’ first 12 weeks of release, some of Netflix’s biggest hits showed significant slippage, with Wednesday notching a staggering 54% drop in its sophomore season. Squid Game fell 43% between seasons 2 and 3, as did Stranger Things between its penultimate and final seasons.
The declines are less dramatic but still significant when accounting for runtime differences: Stranger Things had a 14% dip in estimated views, Squid Game 33% and Wednesday 43%. (Bridgerton, on the other hand, saw a rise in estimated views from S2 to S3 despite a drop in minutes streamed.)
However, at Netflix’s scale, this is less a sign of weakness and more a reflection of audience normalization across an enormous content base. The service offsets title-level decay with constant freshness and breadth, claiming the honor of top streaming original series nearly every week in the process.
It’s a striking contrast to the streamer’s competitors, with Paramount+ being perhaps the most striking. With one of the lowest totals of U.S. TV premieres among the major streaming services (only Disney+ and HBO Max had fewer in 2025), Paramount+ has built out a strategy relying on fewer originals with outsize returns.
Across multiple flagship titles — all, it should be noted, hailing from the Taylor Sheridan-verse — the service consistently shows positive season-over-season growth. Megahit Landman and Yellowstone prequel 1923 both grew their minutes streamed by about 40% in S2 while roughly doubling their estimated views. Even the less-watched Lioness and Tulsa King have grown their audiences annually.
It should not be taken as an absolute that simply releasing fewer shows will result in steady audience growth, nor is such growth the only measure of success. However, season-over-season audience change offers a practical way to assess whether a series is functioning as expandable IP, and growth signals increasing fandom and extension potential.
After all, Netflix, for all its success, is still struggling to build viable franchises — one of the few advantages its legacy media competitors still hold and one the streamer is aiming to correct by acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery.
Paramount+, meanwhile, through its proliferation of Sheridan-created series and spinoffs (look for Yellowstone expansions Marshals and The Madison later this year), has shown that titles with sustained audience growth are often not just hits but franchise-grade IP.
For more data on the top streaming hits and their audiences, check out Luminate SV(M).
