The Squid Game Effect: Are US Netflix Audiences Watching More Asian Content?
by Sandra Brenda.
Although Hwang Dong-hyuk wasn’t known worldwide before Squid Game, he was already popular in South Korea when his smash hit series launched on Netflix in September 2021. As a director, producer, and screenwriter, Hwang was not afraid to raise important social issues or confront the country’s more difficult topics in his work.
Squid Game is no different. It’s the story of a group of people in desperate need of money, often as a result of their heavy gambling losses. They’re given a choice of whether to take part in a mysterious competition based on “easy children’s games,” with the prize set at 45.6 billion won (USD $38 million). Little do they know that to lose this game also means losing their lives, and only the winner will be rolling in cash (and blood).
The show gained enormous audience interest worldwide, eventually setting a Netflix record for the most-watched show of all time — a combined 1.65 billion hours of viewing time globally in the first 28 days of its release. This is quite a feat for a non-English language series, with no initial marketing campaign in the United States.
According to Forbes, the series’s impact, called “the Squid Game effect,” even boosted the popularity of other Asian shows on Netflix, such as Alice in Borderland (a Japanese production) or Sweet Home (a Korean production). But what do the viewership numbers say?
Let’s first dive into our viewership data to see how Squid Game performed in the United States, Japan, and South Korea during its first 120 days on Netflix. Note that Squid Game has 9 episodes and 8.25 hours in total watch time.
Squid Game, 120-day performance
United States, South Korea, and Japan
We can see that almost 69% of all profiles on Netflix in Korea watched Squid Game during the series’s first 3 months on the platform, compared to 46% of American and 35% of Japanese viewers.
Using the Average Time Spent (ATS) metric, we can also conclude that Americans were slightly less willing to spend time on the series than Koreans or Japanese. Americans spent 5.23 hours watching the series on average (63.4% of the total watch time). Koreans spent 6.26 hours (75.9%), and the Japanese spent 5.35 hours (64.8%).
Now let’s dig deeper. Let’s compare Squid Game to Clickbait, which was the second most popular series in the US in September 2021 with 20.2 million Unique Viewers. It was released on Netflix on August 25, 2021.
Audience Engagement: Squid Game vs. Clickbait
First 60 days
Squid Game’s post-release curve shows its impressive lifecycle in the United States. Normalizing for the release dates for both series, we can see that Squid Game had its highest viewership on day 16, with 11.9 million UVs. Clickbait’s highest viewership was on day 12, with 2.4 million UVs, although it more or less kept a steady stream of UVs engaged at the same level in the first two weeks.
Because Squid Game famously relied purely on word of mouth and social media to gain traction with audiences in the United States, its performance is unusual for a Netflix Original. Instead of a spike in week 1 or 2 followed by a decay in week 3, day 9 actually sees a big jump in UVs to 11.1 million, up from 9.3 million on day 8 and 6.2 million on day 7.
Below, we examine how audience interest in Squid Game in the 3 markets was shaped day-by-day using our Popularity Index, a relative popularity metric based on UVs in a given period, where the results for each country are normalized using a maximum period value as a reference:
We can see that Koreans watched the series immediately after its release on Netflix, while Japanese viewers needed a little more time to get hooked. US audience growth took the longest. And, although the popularity peak was reached in Japan a bit later, Squid Game stayed in the Japanese zeitgeist for much longer than in the US and South Korea.
Now let’s see if Squid Game had a visible impact on two other East Asian productions gaining recognition in the United States:
In September 2021, Alice in Borderland was ranked 37th in the Top 200 Series list, capturing 2.7M Unique Viewers that month, while Sweet Home was 155th with almost a million UVs (972.7k UVs). The following month, both series jumped in the rankings, into 14th place (6.6M UVs) and 111th place (1.5M UVs), respectively.
But there were also other East Asian productions gaining popularity thanks to Squid Game.
For this analysis, we took a look at Netflix’s top series made in China, Thailand, Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, and South Korea:
Overall, among all the East Asian content on Netflix, Japanese productions continuously capture the largest share of US audiences — for example, over 15% of Netflix’s Top 200 series in April 2021 were made in Japan.
Interestingly, after the release of Squid Game in September 2021, we can observe a new trend. The number of Japanese productions goes down in favor of Korean ones, while the general Asian-production share remains relatively the same.
Moreover, we can spot a correlation between the productions of both countries. In November 2021, an increase in Anime was followed by a decrease in the popularity of K-dramas, as presented in the chart below:
Above, we captured a rising trend in the percentage share of Japanese and Korean productions in the United States’s top 200 series list before Squid Game’s release. However, there’s a noticeable shift after Squid Game’s Netflix premiere — the share of Korean productions grows much faster and at the expense of the Japanese ones.
The table below presents the average number of pre-and post-Squid Game Korean and Japanese productions in the US monthly Top 200 series ranker:
The average number of Korean series in the monthly top 200 ranking increased nearly two-fold, with 4.75 pre- and 8.55 post-Squid Game productions on average.
What will the future bring? Will the popularity of South Korean productions continue to rise? Will the Japanese surprise the world with a streaming hit like Squid Game? We’ll keep our finger on the pulse.
The audience measurement data in this article is from Showlabs.tv, developed by PlumResearch.
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