Amazon‘s biggest visual production to date, The Grand Tour, starring Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, shows clear appeal amongst UK SVOD viewers. GfK‘s established SVOD content tracking and analysis reveals that the show was the most viewed title on Amazon in both November and December 2016, attracting the biggest audience reach for an Amazon show in the UK since GfK‘s tracking service began in 2015.
Despite launching halfway through the month, The Grand Tour (TGT) became the most streamed show on Amazon in November 2016, accounting for eight percent of all the streams watched. The following month, that increased to 17 percent of all streams, proving TGT to be a clear winner, well ahead of the second placed title, The Man in the High Castle, which attracted nine percent of all streams viewed.
Even more interesting, 45 percent of all Amazon users in December watched at least one episode of the programme: the highest proportion of unique viewers ever recorded by GfK – not just for Amazon, but also across all other platforms captured by GfK’s tracker in the UK, which includes Netflix and NowTV.
If this were to be equated to actual viewer numbers, GfK’s estimates would put the total audience for TGT at around 2.3 million viewers, a figure slightly higher than the 2.1 million online adults recorded by BARB as watching Game of Thrones on Sky Atlantic during the same time period.
TGT driving new sign-up to Amazon
One key reason behind Amazon’s investment in TGT was not just to attract publicity and views, but to encourage sign up amongst a different target audience from existing subscribers. GfK’s analysis of the reasons people give for signing up for the service indicates that TGT has been successful in this aim. In November and December 2016, the top reason for sign up was ‘to watch original series made by the provider’. This was claimed by 22 percent of Amazon users, the highest percentage ascribed to this reason since June 2016, when the launch of BrainDead and Mr Robot 2 also sparked interest.
