What's the Biggest Streaming Service? Depends on Who You Ask

pcmag.com:

If you've gone searching for info on The Flight Attendant, The Gilded Age, or Peacemaker in the past three months, you may have contributed to the table above. That's a donut of data from the service JustWatch.com, which lets users figure out which shows and movies are streaming and where. According to these stats, HBO Max saw a growth of 2% of its market share, which allowed it to overtake both Disney+ and Hulu. Netflix and Prime Video are still on top.

Another table from JustWatch shows the changes over the quarter per streaming service. Prime Video, HBO Max, Apple TV+, and Paramount+ all went up, Netflix and Hulu are down, and Disney+ stayed the same.

But these numbers are based on "measured interest in SVOD [subscription video on demand] services on JustWatch" and only for the US. "Measured interest" translates to how many times someone looked for content and found it on the various streamers. Lots of searches for Stranger Things, for example, would probably push Netflix up, not down (so expect that as the fourth season approaches). But is this the right way to measure SVOD market share? It is, after all, how JustWatch and competitors like ReelGood and now Plex do it: They each use data they've collected from their own users.

And why not? You probably don't want to base it on the number of people with access to the service. Access doesn't equal viewing. A 2021 ScreenMedia article argues that subscriber numbers are "a flawed measure of SVOD success." The reason is that the number of subscribers is self-reported. Netflix cherry-picks how it will report things, usually breaking down things by region so you can't even accurately estimate the number of US-only subscribers, for example. Some streamers report only on paying