Paramount Global is touting a successful launch for the second season of Landman.
According to the company, the Season 2 premiere episode amassed more than 9.2M “streaming views” in its first two days. Paramount is defining “streaming views” just like its competitors at Netflix and Disney as minutes viewed divided by runtime.
Paramount boasts that as a 262% audience increase over the Season 1 premiere, which would make it the most-watched premiere for any original series for Paramount+.
However, the problem is that there is no publicly available data to compare those numbers to, since Paramount didn’t release two-day streaming viewership for the Season 1 premiere — and it seems the company has changed its audience metrics as well.
Deadline previously reported 5.2M same-day viewers for the Season 1 debut episode across both streaming and linear airings based on a combination of internal data and VideoAmp metrics, but Paramount did not specify streaming-specific numbers. While the series is a streaming original, the Season 1 premiere was simulcast on Paramount Network as well.
Since Season 2 is exclusively on streaming, Paramount ditched the VideoAmp data and is claiming this performance based solely on internal global metrics. And, for what is believed to be the first time, Paramount is deferring to what is increasingly becoming the industry standard reporting metric for streaming, which is the “views,” a.k.a minutes viewed divided by runtime.
In the past, including for those Landman Season 1 numbers, Paramount opted to report “active sub households,” which would capture the number of active accounts that watched the episode. This would not account for co-viewing, because the streamer doesn’t have a way to know how many people are watching on one screen.
So, the “views” metric attempts to capture more closely exactly how many people watched. However, it is an imperfect measurement with several flaws. Namely, it assumes that every time a user watches a new piece of content, they make it all the way through every single time, which is ultimately inflating unique views. In reality, it’s more likely that some users might watch multiple times, while many never make it to the end the first time.
What’s interesting is that Samba TV previously reported that the Season 2 premiere was watched by 1.7M U.S. households on the day it debuted, which it says was down 39% from the 2.7M U.S. households that watched the Season 1 premiere in that time frame.
Obviously Paramount is measuring global viewership, so Samba’s numbers don’t tell the full story, though it does help illustrate how the difference between households and “views” can alter the understanding of a title’s performance.
Deadline has asked Paramount for comment about the change in audience measurement.
Netflix popularized the “views” metric when it changed its own measurement process in 2023 on the heels of the release of Queen Charlotte, which quite memorably put the series back in play to become one of its most popular (for a time). Disney has also since opted to use this metric in many of its reports as well.
Co-created by Taylor Sheridan and Christian Wallace, Landman Billy Bob Thornton, Demi Moore, Andy Garcia, Ali Larter and Sam Elliott. Additional cast includes Jacob Lofland, Michelle Randolph, Paulina Chávez, Kayla Wallace, Mark Collie, James Jordan and Colm Feore.
In Season 2, as oil rises from the earth, so do secrets – and Tommy Norris’s (Thornton) breaking point may be closer than he realizes. Facing mounting pressure from M-Tex Oil, Cami Miller (Moore), and the shadow of his kin, survival in West Texas isn’t noble – it’s brutal. And sooner or later something’s got to break.
