No judgments, but did you binge all eight episodes of Prime TV’s Fallout show as soon as they dropped? I showed a lot of restraint by watching four episodes one day and four more episodes the next day, but I know certain members of PC Gamer watched the entire season in a single session.
We’re not alone in jetting through the Fallout show, either: according to Amazon, 65 million people watched the show in the first 16 days of its release, which began when all eight episodes became available on April 10. That’s a lot of pairs of irradiated eyeballs making Fallout the second-most watched show ever on Prime, following The Lords of the Rings: The Rings of Power which aired in 2022.
According to Variety, which has access to a press release I was never sent (I’m not mad, I’m just saying), Fallout is Amazon’s most-watched show ever among people aged 18-34 (I just missed that cutoff because I am 35, as far as you know). It was also especially a hit in Brazil, France, and the UK—60% of viewers came from outside the US. In other words, if you’re an advertiser and you’d like to sell some Nuka Cola or YumYum Devilled Eggs to young people in those countries, I think you know who to call.
Advertising opportunities aside, 65 million is a heck of a lot of people all watching the same show—though I caution you to take those numbers with a heavy dose of a chem called Grain-O-Salt because I’m still pretty foggy about how these streaming services calculate their viewers.
Netflix, for example, used to consider anyone who watched 70 percent of just a single episode of a television series as a “viewer,” and at one point even considered anyone who watched just two flippin’ minutes of any movie or show as having “viewed” it. YouTube apparently also considers 30 seconds a “view” even if a video is an hour long. How does Amazon count its views and viewers? They haven’t confided in me yet. If I find out, I’ll let you know.
One thing’s for sure: the Fallout show is good and however many people actually watched it was enough to quickly get a second season greenlit. That’s a big Vault-Boy thumbs up in my book.
