The Mandalorian: Breaking Down Season 3 Ratings From Third-Party Services Over Time

The Mandalorian wrapped its third season on Disney Plus in April, but after Nielsen unveiled their measured ratings for the week where the finale premiered on Disney Plus, it seems like the right time to do a full breakdown of how third-party services have been measuring the performance of the new season on the platform.



Let us begin with a warning before we get into the meat of the story. As we usually try to convey with these reports, we cannot stress enough that these are not definitive numbers; only Disney Plus has those and, at least for now, they are not releasing them to the public. So all we can do so far is try to read between the lines of what other people are measuring through tracking the audience's response and other indicators that we will try to carefully explain. These are also US-only numbers, and how the new season, along with past shows that we might compare it to, performed internationally is completely unknown. In the case of Andor, for instance, there are some reports saying that while the show may have underperformed in North America, it had solid ratings overseas.



(L-R): Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and Bo-Katan Kryze (Katee Sackhoff) in Lucasfilm’s THE MANDALORIAN, season 3, exclusively on Disney+. ©2023 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.


<h3>The Mandalorian season 3 numbers according to Nielsen</h3>


Without further ado, let's get to it, and we shall begin studying Nielsen's numbers from the third season and comparing them to how other series performed. The graphic below indicates the number provided by the company for each of the eight weeks the third season was airing on Disney Plus, but it can be slightly misleading, so let us explain it. Each point represents the millions of minutes watched that each of the series accumulated during the corresponding week of release -- for instance, in the case of the first week of release of The Mandalorian season 3, Nielsen measured a total of 823 million minutes watched across all 17 episodes of the show -- not just season 3, or even that week's episode.



Of course, we can safely assume that the majority of people that tuned into the show that week watched the new episode, but if someone were to watch the last three episodes of the second season and then watched Chapter 17, all of that would be added into this number of 823M minutes. This is one of the reasons why, even though Nielsen is typically one of the more reliable third-party services, the numbers they provide only tell us half the picture. But when we start comparing them with how other shows performed, we start to get some sense of what went down. In this case, they are generally easy to read.



We see a slight drop in interest from the premiere episodes from season 2 going into season 3, and if we also consider the fact that there was more Mandalorian to watch on the week of Feb. 27-March 5, that gap becomes even wider. There are a couple of possible reasons for this, as we've explained before -- one can be the Book of Boba Fett effect, where viewers might have been turned off by the drop in quality that show might have represented for them (this isn't necessarily reflected in Nielsen's numbers, though, as indicated by the graphic below); it could even be a combination of Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi not meeting expectations. Even if the two of them are completely disconnected, that's just not how the general fan views the franchise.



The most likely scenario, however, is that when season 2 of The Mandalorian came out (late October 2020), everyone was at home and looking forward to anything new coming out on TV, streaming, or happening in the world. (Tuning out of the pre-election political conversation is a factor we must also consider!) However, in March 2023, people are now back to normal and what used to be 'I can't wait to watch the new season of The Mandalorian on Friday!' has turned into a 'Oh, is the new season of The Mandalorian out? We should check it out!' So what used to be a day-one watch is now a 'We'll get around to it'.



And we can really see that effect, which is also exaggerated by the fact that there is so much more stuff coming out in the world of entertainment than there was in 2020. This is also proven by the fact that week 2 had more people tune into the show, and we see a huge peak in week 3, both due to an effect of viewers tuning in late, and also because the second episode was quite solid and that might have generated some excitement and made people watch the next episode very quickly.



On the flip side, we see how the third episode was received poorly because, in week 4, people decided to wait. They were not as excited for what came next, though they eventually got around to watching the episodes that they were behind on, as we see the line go up, peaking once again with the sixth episode. History repeats itself here -- people are catching up after lagging behind for 1-2 weeks, and after a very solid episode 5, everyone tunes into episode 6. But now, the sixth episode is not as well-received, and we see a decline in the numbers again. It's not as big this time around, but we can definitely feel it. Now, however, that doesn't go up again for the finale. What is likely to happen here is that some viewers fell off mid-season, and those who didn't but also didn't keep up with it on a weekly basis, will tune into the finale in the weeks after.







This sounds like a plausible explanation of how the series performed with viewers, and definitely looks to be more realistic than many doom-like reports that have been circulating the Internet for weeks regarding the show's underperformance. (Hint: it didn't exactly underperform.) However, as we've alluded to, Nielsen's numbers are slightly misleading because they can't really distinguish between seasons or episodes.



For that reason, it's usually good to pair up the graphic above with the one below, where we have divided the minutes watched by the total runtime of the show up until each week. This is also not a perfect method, because it assumes that there are as many people watching Chapter 17 on week 1 as there are watching any other episode. However, if we don't compare different shows and look at only the lines from The Mandalorian, we can see that this method allows us to easily see the tendency of around the same amount of people watching every week, with small drops (week 3-4) and small upticks (week 2-3).






<h3>The Mandalorian season 3 numbers according to Samba TV</h3>


Another recurring name when discussing streaming ratings is Samba TV. This is another third-party service that tracks viewership data of recently-released movies and TV series, by sampling three million households among 25M possibilities and measuring how many of them watched said show. This number is easily and often misinterpreted as the true number of people that tuned into the program, so we must stress that this is not the case, and there are a few asterisks to be said here.



First of all, we only have actual numbers from Samba TV from the premiere and the finale of The Mandalorian season 3, and even that requires additional comments. According to the company, and as we've reported before, 1.6M out of those 3M households they track tuned in to watch Chapter 17 of The Mandalorian between March 1-5. Notice that this time, it is a case where they are specifically talking about one episode, and not the series as a whole, as opposed to Nielsen. But the viewing window is also a key part of the conversation and very important when comparing it to numbers reported from other series.



In the case of the finale, Samba TV also reported that 1.4M households watched Chapter 24 over the first five days of release, which represents a slight decline from The Book of Boba Fett's 1.5M in that same window, but an increase over season 2's 1.1M. However, we can't really compared their numbers week to week. It's also very suspicious that one of the most popular episodes of the entire series, and one that overperformed according to Nielsen, had such a small viewership number.



This is one of the big problems with Samba TV -- they only publicly report viewing numbers in specific instances, and not on a weekly basis like Nielsen does. They do release weekly top 10s based on the data they gather, but they are not accompanied by the numbers. You can find those charts below. We have reached out to Samba TV to try to clarify the situation with the viewership numbers on each individual episode and even the finale's number over the five-day window, but they have yet to respond.



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<h3>The Mandalorian season 3 audience demand numbers according to Parrot Analytics</h3>


Another interesting way to gauge the audience's response to a series is by analyzing Parrot Analytics' charts of overall demand for streaming shows. More than for any of the previous systems, this is the one that should not be compared to how previous seasons of The Mandalorian or other Star Wars shows performed, as the numbers Parrot Analytics provide are compared to everything else that is available at this moment, which is an ever-changing landscape.



The company is able to track demand for every series on streaming (and on TV overall, but we shall focus on streaming at this point) by measuring social media reactions, the number of articles published about it, and even how much it is pirated, among other factors. In the case of The Mandalorian, for instance, it puts together all of that information and compares it to the average show, and concludes: in this specific window of time, the audience showed more interest in The Mandalorian than in the average streaming show by a factor of X. You can see below the graphics for each week the show was on the air, and in the caption of each image, you may find a link to the story on Parrot Analytics' website, where they also included a comparison to all TV series, not just streaming-only.



As an additional note, there was a bump of 35% from the week before Chapter 17 aired to the week of, and a 13% drop from the week Chapter 24 aired to the week after, later followed by another 9% and an 8% decline, though the show still stayed on top in the three weeks after the finale aired. Check out the charts here:



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Finally, as a bit of a sendoff, we revisited another grain-of-sault measurement that we've explored once in the past, which consists of tracking how many people have been searching online for the names of these shows. Obviously, this is not at all a way to track how many people tuned into the show, but if we are discussing audience interest into these series, it is an interesting graph. We see that, at least in terms of Google searches, the show peaked in its first two seasons, and it never reached half those numbers at any point during season 3. Notice, however, that only 'Obi Wan' has been able to crack 50% of those peaks that we see in season 1 and season 2 of The Mandalorian:



Comparison between the search terms “Mandalorian”, “Boba Fett”, “Obi Wan”, and 'Andor' in the U.S., from November 1, 2020, to May 24, 2023.



The Mandalorian season 4 is in pre-production, and though it was targeting an October filming start, the ongoing strike by the Writers Guild of America could alter those plans and we might get the show a bit later than initially anticipated. For now, the story of the New Republic Era continues with this August's Ahsoka.



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