Here’s some quick, inside baseball: An entertainment website like ours relies on a mix of traffic from search, referrals, and our regular, everyday audience to survive. It used to be that referrals—i.e., Facebook—dominated, so a lot of sites wrote with Facebook in mind (I’m sure you remember the Upworthy-like headlines). Many of those sites also no longer exist or are selling parts to George Soros to stave off Vivek Ramaswamy. Now that social media devalues links, search is a bigger driver of traffic, which is why you often run across articles on entertainment websites like “Here’s Everything You Need to Know about Joker 3” or “Has FX’s Old Man Been Renewed for a Season 3?”
I feel like some sites sacrifice their everyday readers for other traffic, but most of them are much bigger than we are, so I’m obviously a terrible businessperson. I do this job because I like it, but I don’t think I’d enjoy it much if I had to write posts like “The 5 Funniest Mistakes That Made It Into Gilligan’s Island,” which is not at all a knock against those more profitable sites.
In our own way, we do go after referral and search traffic, less with “Here’s Everything You Need to Know about the 15th Season of Big Bang Theory“-type posts and more by focusing on certain subjects. But here’s what I know about our readership based on direct traffic: Our everyday readers love celebrities and mess, and they love having Jason or Lindsay write 1,500 words on an art movie or an esoteric horror flick to make us feel better about reading posts about celebrities and mess. No judgment — I’m exactly the same way. I’d rather write about Megan Fox mess than The Brutalist, but I still want to read about The Brutalist because I want more than just Megan Fox mess posts. If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding!
All of this is really just my way of explaining why I write about Taylor Sheridan on a left-leaning website whose everyday readers are 65% female and mostly hate Taylor Sheridan. It’s a popular subject, the traffic is good, and I also happen to enjoy dunking on Taylor Sheridan and his stupidly entertaining shows. (There are a lot of popular subjects we don’t write about because we don’t like them — like Logan Paul or NCIS.) Also, every post can’t be about Ben Affleck’s love life, which is a shame, really, because those are legit three-quadrant posts!
Visitors, both every day and search-based, also like rating posts, which is why I’m writing this. Also, because I like writing about ratings. And right now, Taylor Sheridan is crushing it. Nielsen ratings lag by a month, but a month ago, while Cross on Prime and The Lincoln Lawyer, The Diplomat, and Outer Banks were dominating on Netflix with their 8-10 episode dumps, Lioness and Tulsa King were hanging right with them, despite once a week episodes (ratings are determined by hours watched) and despite having only 25% of the worldwide subscribers of Netflix.
More recently, SAMBA TV ratings show that last week, Sheridan’s Landman was the top streaming program of the week, and Lioness was number five. Netflix’s The Madness, Black Doves, and the Lindsay Lohan movie Our Little Christmas were sandwiched in between. (Megan Fox’s Subservience, meanwhile, was at number six.)
Sheridan was killing it a month ago on streaming with Lioness and Tulsa King, and now he’s killing it with Lioness and Landman, while he also had the third-highest-rated show on all of linear (broadcast and cable) last week with Yellowstone.
The rose will definitely wilt on Taylor Sheridan at some point (that point may be the Rip and Beth Show), but it’s worth noting that Sheridan is currently crushing the HBO offering Dune: Prophecy, which has fallen to number nine. I will also note that our readership for Dune: Prophecy has been scant across all three quadrants. No one cares about it. Given its expense, I’d be surprised if it is renewed for another season, despite the fact that development began on it before the season started. It’s been a very loud thud for HBO.
