If you've been closely observing Nielsen's weekly rankings of the top subscription streaming shows in the U.S. each week, it's been clear that Netflix's once dominant usage hegemony has ebbed a bit in the last few years.
And yes, even by Next TV's own calculations last month, Netflix viewing was down 4% year over year through the first five months of 2023.
However, we see absolutely no indicators, anecdotal or otherwise, that Amazon Prime Video, or any other SVOD, has somehow fully closed a huge usage chasm and has surpassed Netflix in U.S. user engagement.
But that seems to be the claim made by Berlin-based streaming video search engine company JustWatch, which released data last week stating that Amazon Prime Video controlled 21% of market share for "measured interest" of U.S. streaming consumers in the second quarter vs. just 20% for Netflix.
JustWatch didn't clarify its methodology, or more fully define what measured interest means, but Amazon VP and Head of Prime Video U.S., Albert Cheng took the claim and ran with it on LinkedIn over the weekend.
JustWatch didn't respond directly to Next TV's email inquiry regarding its methodology. However, we asked about it broadly and generally in a response to Cheng's post ... and media-focused social influencer Evan Shapiro helpfully directed the question directly to JustWatch.
Company founder and CEO David Croyé responded to Shapiro.
"We have over 40 million monthly active users with over 10 million in the U.S., Croyé wrote.
For our market share statistics, we are looking at several interaction signals on justwatch.com and our apps. We look at how many users are saving their streaming services to filter only what they can watch within their subscriptions, we look at and weigh the amount of clicks we are sending towards the streaming services as well as searches, adding things to watchlist and TV show tracking, etc."
Now here's the kicker -- Croyé seems to be asking us to dismiss JustWatch's bold declaration about Amazon beating Netflix in user engagement.
"Our market share statistics must be taken with a grain of salt and more directional in showing longer-term trends," he added. "As JustWatch users are mostly heavy users with several streaming services things like the ban on password sharing, etc. will definitely show up earlier and heavier in our trends than in the general population."
To Croyé's credit, JustWatch's data does seem to jibe with the "directional" trend of Amazon Prime Video usage vs. that of Netflix.
Amazon doesn't publicly disclose how many Amazon Prime members it is the U.S., or globally for that matter. But late last year, research company Parks Associates published data suggesting that Prime Video has surpassed Netflix in U.S. subscriber count.
