Netflix: Documentary Series “Tiger King” Breaks Audience Records

Unheard of for a documentary: the new Netflix series, “Tiger King”, was watched by more than 34 million viewers in the United States and this, in just ten days after its first broadcast.

Tigers, megalos, conspiracies and attempted murder: the perfect cocktail? On March 20, Netflix launched the broadcast of a new documentary series in seven episodes, Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness, aka Au kingdom des fauves en France. As a result, in particular, of the widespread confinement implemented in an increasing number of countries, the series quickly benefited from an unprecedented success on the streaming platform and on social networks. Although it came out of the blue, for example, it exceeded 90% “freshness” on the review site, Rotten Tomatoes, within days. For seven days after its release, the series remained number one on the Netflix internal rankings. Today, the agency Nielsen, which covers television audiences in the United States, reveals how the series is positioned in relation to the biggest recent successes of the SVOD platform.

In the first 10 days of its existence, Tiger King has been watched by 34.3 million Americans. In comparison, it’s a little more than three million more than the first ten days of season two of Stranger Things in October 2017 and only two less than the start of the third season of Stranger Things, in July 2019. Never seen before for a documentary! Between March 20 and March 29, The Fawn Kingdom was watched on average every minute by about 19 million viewers in the United States – compared to 17.5 for Stranger Things 2 and 20.5 for Stranger Things 3. According to Nielsen, word of mouth has greatly helped audiences for the new documentary series. On its first day of broadcasting, Au kingdom des fauves was only viewed by 280,000 American viewers per minute, less than season two of Minhunter (395,000 viewers per minute) or season one of Altered Carbon (335,000 per minute). However, during the first ten days of its existence, the series’ official hashtag, #TigerKing, would have been used by 1.8 million unique users (excluding automatic and commercial publications) on Twitter – far ahead of any other. television program during this period. It still remains for Netflix to reveal the international audiences for the said series. In any case, all of these figures do not yet compete with the phenomenal successes (in the United States and abroad) reported by Netflix last year for the films Murder Mystery or Birdbox.