How Large is the Warrior Nun Audience?

We know there are tens of thousands of very active Warrior Nun fans who continue the fight to save the show. One of the ongoing frustrations with Netflix is that there’s no public information about how many people watched the show; we know it’s considerable for Season 1, else Season 2 would not have been green-lit. But what are those numbers? How large is the fandom, inclusive of the people who casually watched the show? Thankfully, we have plenty of data to make an informed guess about just how large the Warrior Nun audience is, and why other entertainment companies might want to pick up the show.

In September 2021, Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos revealed rarely-seen combinations of metrics as he talked about how Netflix was pivoting from the number of accounts that watched a show in the first 28 days of its premiere versus the number of hours a show was watched in the first 28 days. With this information, it’s possible to reverse-engineer the number of accounts for any given show if we know the number of hours.

Netflix, of course, released its Top 10 numbers for when Warrior Nun Season 2 premiered, and the two weeks after the premiere. In that month, Warrior Nun accrued almost 66 million hours of viewing time, which works out to about 9.5 million Netflix accounts. Now, we don’t know how many people actually watch on any given Netflix account (especially once they started cracking down on password sharing in 2023!), but 9.5 million would be the most conservative estimate as it assumes 1 person per Netflix account. Realistically, according to a 2017 study by Civic Science, 77% of Netflix accounts have more than one person using them, so that number is almost certainly higher, but we can’t infer how much higher because there’s no way to tell, for example, if one person in a household avidly watched Warrior Nun and another did not; thus, we opt for the most conservative estimate.

Now, to ascertain how many people watched Season 1, we’re confronted by a bit of a challenge. Netflix only started releasing its Top 10 data in late 2021; prior to that, everything was entirely opaque. What we do have, however, is historical search volume data via Google. Using Google’s historical data and Netflix’s revealed data (cross-referenced with the Netflix shows that Sarandos revealed in his presentation), we’re able to infer that Season 1’s premiere reached 21.8 million Netflix accounts back in 2020. Give that some thought for a moment. You’re part of a fandom, an audience, a movement of tens of millions of people.

We all know Netflix did absolutely no promotion of Season 2. We know they put all their time and effort into Wednesday, giving short shrift to us and other properties. But what if they had done right by Warrior Nun? What if they had invested in marketing Season 2 the way they marketed subsequent seasons of shows like Bridgerton? Using the average lift of other Netflix shows that received appropriate marketing, Season 2 of Warrior Nun could have reached 25.6 million Netflix accounts in the first 28 days - and this is the key point for other entertainment companies. With the right amount of promotion, acquiring and continuing the Warrior Nun story could bring literal millions of new members to your service.