Intro: What If We Used to Be Worse?

In her essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” Joan Didion makes the case for journaling as a way of staying in touch with our former selves: “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.” This sounds charming in the abstract. But what if the person you used to be was significantly worse? What if willful ignorance is the wiser choice?

What if—God forbid—you once had terrible taste in movies? And what if a document existed chronicling these regrettable selections? Unfortunately for me, such a document exists. A few years ago, I found my middle-school yearbook, which was cute until it wasn’t. Every entry asked its subject to list their favorite things, and there, preserved in permanent ink, were my favorite movies: Scary Movie 3, Not Another Teen Movie, and Shrek 2. Yikes! No Citizen Kane. No Hungarian slow cinema. No Hitchcock. Not even The Godfather, Part I or II. Just spoofs and sequels.

In previous articles, I’ve explored how musical taste forms, finding that our favorite songs and styles take shape during adolescence and remain remarkably stable after our twenties. My middle-school movie favorites, by contrast, bear little resemblance to my viewing habits today. Perhaps our taste in film evolves differently than our taste in music. Maybe the radical reinvention of movie-watching preference is a universal phenomenon.

So today, we’ll explore how movie taste shifts with age and how nostalgia distorts our sense of filmmaking quality.

How Does Our Taste in Movies Change With Age?

MovieLens is an online community that collects movie ratings and uses them to recommend films to its users. In 2004, the project published an anonymized dataset containing more than 1 million user ratings submitted between 1995 and 2003, along with each reviewer’s age and gender. This archive spans several files and requires substantial assembly and cleaning before it can be analyzed, so I did the legwork of turning it into a usable, single-file dataset that paying subscribers can download here.

Using this extensive record of moviegoing preferences, we can examine how our tastes and viewing habits evolve with age.

As a new parent, my mind immediately went to movie-viewing volume. With a four-month-old, I am not exactly plugged into movie culture—or really any culture unrelated to said four-month-old. So I wanted to know whether this “parent tax” is universal: Do we watch fewer films as our responsibilities grow?

The answer, unsurprisingly, is yes. In the MovieLens dataset, average rating volume peaks among users ages 25 to 34, then declines with each passing decade.

But this metric captures all forms of movie watching: DVDs, cable television, and trips to the theater. When we isolate contemporary releases—films likely to have been seen in theaters—a different pattern emerges. Instead of peaking in early adulthood, theatrical moviegoing is highest in our teenage years and early twenties, then declines steadily thereafter.

A friend recently asked me whether the dueling box office success of Obsession and Backrooms was “bringing younger audiences back to theaters.” This question was likely inspired by some New Yorker trend piece that chronicles a sweeping cultural shift roughly two weeks before that trend is obsolete.

My hot take is that younger viewers have always made up a large share of theatrical audience. Whenever a movie becomes a surprise hit, people scrutinize its turnout, discover that young people were in the theater, and briefly treat their presence as a revelation.

At the same time, Obsession and Backrooms are both horror films, which brings us to the intersection of genre preference and age. You are more likely to find younger audiences at a scary movie inspired by a 4chan internet meme (Backrooms) than at a dad-core drama about a meteorologist trying to predict the weather on D-Day—which is the actual premise of a movie currently in theaters called Pressure. If you’ve seen Band of Brothers multiple times, own several Jack Ryan novels, and think Apple’s weather app is lacking in detail, then this movie’s for you.

Indeed, our MovieLens data reveals a clear generational divide across several genres: younger audiences tend to favor horror, comedy, animation, and action, while older viewers gravitate toward dramas, war films, and romance.

If genre preference were the only thing shaped by age, that would be a fun find, but not enough to justify an entire study. Fortunately—or perhaps unfortunately—there’s more.

In a strange and philosophically punishing twist, the factor most strongly shaped by age is time. Put less cryptically, age shapes how we relate to movies from the past and present, a phenomenon known as “nostalgia bias”: the tendency to favor older releases while viewing contemporary movies with greater skepticism.

Using the MovieLens dataset, we can compare movie ratings by the number of years between a film’s release and the reviewer’s birth. The results suggest that movies were best before you existed, declined around the time you arrived, and have been getting worse ever since—a sentiment consistent across generations.

Self-selection likely shapes our view of older “classics,” since the most revisited movies from the 1940s are those that stand the test of time, like Casablanca and Citizen Kane. More surprising is that our bias against newer films persists even after we come of age and begin actively consuming contemporary releases. So when a podcast host waxes nostalgic about the cinematic excellence of the 1990s, remember that, soon, a new generation of podcasters will be extolling the greatness of the 2000s and 2010s because that’s just how time works.

And if you are on the older side and feel somewhat attacked by this piece—because you own several Jack Ryan novels and think Pressure sounds like a pleasant night at the movies—know it’s not all bad.

According to MovieLens data, older cohorts tend to rate movies more favorably.

The caveat is that, as we observed earlier, older viewers also watch fewer movies, making them less likely to encounter films outside their core interests. But if we are choosing optimism, perhaps they simply know who they are and what they like—and what they like is movies about D-Day.

Decades from now, I too will sit at the far end of this distribution, enclosed within an igloo of Jack Ryan novels, deriding films based on 8chan memes, and yearning for the cinematic glory days of Shrek 2 and Scary Movie 3.

Final Thoughts: Nodding Terms

When I first approached this topic, I gravitated toward the negative: the idea that our younger selves are lesser versions of who we are today. But as I worked through the piece, my perspective began to shift—which is just a kinder way of saying I stopped being a sourpuss. In particular, I found myself contemplating my changing relationship with David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.

I first watched this movie when I was 14, which is far too young to watch Mulholland Drive (for several reasons). For one, I had never encountered surrealist art. By the time the credits rolled, I was furious. What the hell had I just seen? I promptly declared it my least favorite movie of all time.

As I went through film school and entertainment-industry internships, I held on to that disgust. I was the guy who harbored a deeply personal grudge against Mulholland Drive. What a cool identity!

Then David Lynch died. A few days after his passing, I decided to give the film another chance. To my surprise, I came away believing the exact opposite. I was now a guy who loved Mulholland Drive. How silly! I subsequently watched the film three times over the next month and now regularly list it among my favorite movies.

There are many takeaways from this story, including the fact that I was an insufferable teenager. But perhaps the most heartening is that we never lose the ability to surprise ourselves.

Following my Mulholland Drive about-face, I’ve revisited several movies I once proclaimed “awful” or “all-time classics.” My perspective is often entirely different, as someone on the other side of puberty—and, more recently, as a parent. Sure, Not Another Teen Movie may not hold up, but neither do Oscar-winning “masterpieces” like American Beauty or Forrest Gump.

My evolving relationship with these films has become a kind of yardstick, not unlike Joan Didion’s notebooks: a way to catch glimpses of my former self. With each rewatch, I find myself “on nodding terms with the [person I] used to be,” better able to understand who I once was and how time has changed me.

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Intro: All of Film Knowledge, for Free

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) was founded in 1990—an almost inconceivable fact for a website that holds present-day relevance. The site began as a series of Usenet message boards and later evolved into an encyclopedic reference point for all film knowledge.

For a millennial film nerd, IMDb was the playground of my early internet days. I spent endless hours wandering the site, memorizing Oscar winners, reading user reviews, and absorbing an alarming amount of useless trivia. It was thrilling, at least for a certain type of indoor kid, and it was just there, on the internet—for free. I absorbed all IMDb had to offer until my search for film knowledge hit diminishing returns. And then I discovered Letterboxd.

Letterboxd is a hip (slightly more pretentious) IMDb with a greater emphasis on social experience. The site focuses on list creation, with users sharing film preferences through curated guides and movie reviews. Examples of popular lists include:

• Befriending the lyrical loneliness…

• chick flicks

• what is reality?

The site has taken off since the pandemic, amassing tens of millions of users and billions of movie ratings, cementing itself as a pillar of contemporary film-nerd culture. But alas, Letterboxd—and its decidedly twee appeal—may be in danger. Earlier this year, reports surfaced that the startup’s largest investor was looking to sell its 60% stake in the platform, just three years after buying in. The news sparked a familiar anxiety: that Letterboxd has reached a pivotal moment in its development, and that the site’s charm could be corrupted if it falls into the wrong hands.

So today, we’ll explore Letterboxd’s unlikely rise, what makes the platform so distinctive, and the economics underlying its current dilemma.

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The Rise and (Potential) Fall of Letterboxd

In the late ‘90s, there was roughly one movie rental store for every 9,000 people in the United States. These stores served as watering holes for film culture, providing a locale for cinephiles to discuss movies and breeding a generation of film lovers and directors, including Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, and Paul Thomas Anderson.

Fast forward to the present day: video stores are nearly extinct, leaving movies without a physical place for community (because people don’t really socialize at theaters).

Enter Letterboxd. If IMDb and early-stage Twitter had a baby, it would look something like Letterboxd: a social network built around the compulsion to log, review, and argue about movies. At its most basic level, the site recreates the feeling of a long, spirited conversation held after the credits roll.

Letterboxd’s popularity has surged since 2020, with the site growing from 1.5 million users in 2019 to more than 26 million by early 2026.

For first-time visitors, Letterboxd may resemble a slightly modernized version of IMDb, which raises a fair question: what’s the big deal? Why does the world need another website where people can argue about Green Book and/or The Last Jedi?

The answer has less to do with the arguments themselves than with who is doing the arguing, and how that audience is reshaping modern movie culture.

The site’s user base skews younger, helping Gen Z—and soon, Gen Alpha—discover 20th-century classics and little-seen international gems.

A few months ago, I decided to see a Taiwanese film called Yi Yi at the theater down the street from my house. This particular theater does not offer digital ticketing, so seating is determined by arrival time, with most attendees arriving at least 30 minutes in advance. For Yi Yi, I took a more lax approach. How many people were going to see a 25-year-old, three-hour Taiwanese film on a Sunday night?

The answer: a full movie theater’s worth of humans.

Upon arrival, I was shocked to learn that I had received the last available seat for a sold-out screening, leaving me in the literal corner of a 400-person auditorium. Stranger still, nearly everyone in the theater appeared to be under the age of 30.

The reason? Yi Yi currently ranks as Letterboxd’s thirteenth-highest-rated film of all time.

When the movie ended, an audience full of people born after 9/11 burst into vigorous applause. For a brief 30 seconds, I genuinely wondered if I was hallucinating.

I am not alone in this experience. What I witnessed was part of a broader phenomenon media outlets have dubbed “the Letterboxd effect”: younger, digitally native audiences being drawn into movie culture via the platform.

While IMDb functions primarily as an online reference guide, Letterboxd offers something closer to a social discovery engine. Most visitors arrive directly at Letterboxd.com rather than arriving via Google search, and its users tend to spend more time per visit and engage with more content.

Much of this stickiness can be attributed to the holy grail of digital media: user-generated content. As the site grows, so does its repository of user ratings and reviews, with 2025 seeing an estimated 700 million ratings logged—outpacing IMDb by a significant margin.

On Letterboxd, the reviews can be as entertaining as the movies themselves. I often find myself reading comments for films I’ve never seen, simply because I enjoy eavesdropping on the thoughts of other movie nerds.

By most user-engagement metrics, Letterboxd is a juggernaut: one of the rare 2010s social media startups to achieve critical mass. But there is an important caveat. For all its momentum, Letterboxd has yet to translate its growing user base into meaningful revenue.

The site may have a passionate, highly engaged audience, but its estimated per-user value remains far below that of larger social platforms.

Letterboxd has solved the hard part of building a social platform: getting people to show up, participate, and care. Now comes the even harder part: turning that devotion into revenue. If you’re a heartless corporate goblin, the gap between Letterboxd’s cultural value and its financial performance looks like an obvious opportunity.

This monetization dilemma stokes a familiar anxiety for extremely online individuals: enshittification. The platforms most successful at monetizing their user base tend to follow a familiar playbook: manipulative algorithms, endless gamification, ads for low-quality products, and a social experience increasingly organized around consumption, à la TikTok Shop. Every one of these tactics runs counter to Letterboxd’s stripped-down appeal. Yet if the site fell into the hands of private-equity vampires with little attachment to its Web 1.0 charm, these would be obvious tools for extracting more value from the platform.

To avoid exploitation of the Letterboxd community, a group of industry professionals—including friend-of-the-newsletter Ted Hope—is organizing a crowdfunding campaign to place the site under the control of a public trust.

The proposed structure would resemble Wikipedia’s model: Letterboxd would be governed with an eye toward its long-term existence rather than generating shareholder value for venture capitalists, founders, or private-equity vampires.

Admittedly, I’m a bit skeptical of this approach, since Wikipedia is the only organization that has sustained something like this at a scale comparable to Letterboxd.

But a long-shot effort to preserve something I love still sounds preferable to watching an asset-management firm gradually suck the life out of it.

So, if you would like to help save Letterboxd, you can check out the campaign here.

Or don’t. You’re a free-thinking individual. You can do whatever you want.

Final Thoughts: Unfortunate Discovery

As Letterboxd grows, so will its costs, and the expectations of its investors. This dilemma—how to sustain the site’s growth and ambition without eroding its cultural value—sits between two competing parts of my personality.

On one side is the deeply American part of me that believes economic Darwinism should determine what survives and what fades into obscurity. Opposing this impulse is a willfully naive romantic who keeps asking the same question: “Why can’t we have nice things?”

As you might imagine, this internal dialogue mostly consists of me 1) fretting over the endangerment of “nice things,” then 2) answering my own concern with apathetic economic theory. According to the latter, Letterboxd’s existential dilemma is the simple product of a free-market “discovery process,” one that unfolds in two stages:

1. Identifying a need: for example, people enjoy wearing shoes when walking around outside.

2. Determining the economic value of that need: The global shoe market is worth billions of dollars, offering a range of price points and styles.

With Letterboxd, these two stages work against each other.

1. The platform has proven a need exists: cinephiles want a social community where they can log, review, debate, and celebrate movies.

2. The platform resists maximizing the economic value of that need: much of Letterboxd’s appeal rests on its community focus and its reluctance to introduce disruptive algorithms, aggressive advertising, or unnatural product placement. People like Letterboxd because it extracts relatively little from them—and many would leave if it started to resemble Pinterest, TikTok, or any over-optimized hellscape.

Paradoxically, Letterboxd’s greatest asset may also be the biggest obstacle to its long-term financial sustainability: its user base.

Which brings us back to IMDb, the only other site to build a meaningful social community around movies. How has this 36-year-old website survived all this time? The simplest answer is that IMDb found a benefactor, and that benefactor was Amazon. The Internet Movie Database functions as a loss leader for the e-commerce giant, with its user-generated content utilized in streaming features, movie rentals, and the broader Amazon entertainment ecosystem.

Contrary to my earlier belief, IMDb was never “just there, on the internet, for free.” There was a cost, and that cost was its independence.

Perhaps Letterboxd can defy the odds, operating as a quasi-public utility sustained by benevolent cinephiles. Yet absent a fundraising miracle, all roads may lead to a familiar question: Why can’t we have nice things?

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Stat Significant’s Book Bestseller Trends 📖

Which books are breaking through right now, and which authors continue to dominate the bestseller lists?

The charts below track recent activity across Amazon’s Kindle Store and The New York Times Best Sellers list. Together, they provide a snapshot of the titles gaining momentum, the books showing sustained popularity, and the fiction and nonfiction authors appearing most often near the top of the charts.

All visuals are updated regularly, with new data added daily and weekly. When available, click “Get Data” at the bottom of a chart to download the underlying dataset.

Because many of the graphics below are interactive, this page is best viewed on the web rather than in an email client or the Substack app.

Table of Contents

For paid subscribers — click a link below to jump straight to that section:

1. Section 1: Trending Titles in Recent Weeks

   1. Top Trending Titles in Amazon’s Kindle Store: Last 7 Days

   2. Top Nonfiction Books on the NYT Best Sellers List: Last 4 Weeks

   3. Top Fiction Books on the NYT Best Sellers List: Last 4 Weeks

2. Section 2: Top Authors in Recent Weeks

   1. Top Fiction Authors on the NYT Best Sellers List: Last 2 Months

   2. Top Nonfiction Authors on the NYT Best Sellers List: Last 2 Months

3. Section 3: Top Books This Past Year

   1. Top Fiction Books on the NYT Best Sellers List: Last 52 Weeks

   2. Top Nonfiction Books on the NYT Best Sellers List: Last 52 Weeks

Section 1: Trending Titles in Recent Weeks

Top Trending Titles in Amazon’s Kindle Store: Last 7 Days

• What This Chart Shows: The top titles on Amazon’s Kindle store charts, across fiction and nonfiction, for the past 7 days. Titles are sorted by the number of days trending and then average chart position.

• Data Source: Amazon’s Kindle Store

• Data Update Frequency: Daily || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

Top Nonfiction Books on the NYT Best Sellers List: Last 4 Weeks

• What This Chart Shows: The top nonfiction titles on The New York Times Best Sellers List over the last four weeks, calculated from NYT's Combined Print & E-Book sales.

• Data Source: The New York Times

• Data Update Frequency: Weekly || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

Read more

Intro: The St. Elsewhere Snow Globe

Before there was The Pitt or ER, there was St. Elsewhere. Premiering in 1982, St. Elsewhere was one of the first modern medical dramas, chronicling the eccentric chaos of St. Eligius, a struggling Boston teaching hospital. In its time, the show was critically beloved, though its legacy is inseparable from one of television’s most divisive finales.

In the final minutes of the final episode, the show abruptly cuts to an alternate reality in which a lead character (Dr. Donald Westphall) appears not as a doctor but as a construction worker. His son Tommy Westphall, who is autistic, sits nearby staring at a snow globe. Inside the snow globe is a tiny replica of the very same St. Eligius Hospital, implying that the entire show existed in the boy’s imagination. Yikes!

Longtime fans were apoplectic: the preceding 136 episodes had been rendered meaningless—a thing TV viewers generally dislike. Despite overwhelming backlash, St. Elsewhere’s finale has endured within popular imagination. And nowhere is the show’s twisted legacy more apparent than in the Tommy Westphall Universe.

The Tommy Westphall Universe is a pre-Internet fan theory that imagines most television shows taking place inside the mind of St. Elsewhere’s Tommy Westphall. The Westphall Universe’s logic goes like this: because characters from St. Elsewhere appeared in crossover episodes for Homicide, and Homicide connects to the Law & Order universe, both shows can be attributed to Tommy. If you allow this web to keep expanding, then programs like Cheers, M*A*S*H, and Chicago Hope all exist within the mind of a child. Ultimately, St. Elsewhere’s finale was so baffling and widely disliked that fans built a satirical TV reality to make sense of their disappointment.

Four decades later, television has changed dramatically, reshaped by streaming and a clearer understanding of what makes for a satisfying conclusion. But has this institutional knowledge led to better endings? Have showrunners learned from the mistakes of St. Elsewhere, Game of Thrones, and other finale fiascos?

So today, we’ll investigate whether omniscient showrunner Tommy Westphall has gotten any better at sticking the landing, how finale quality has changed in recent decades, and whether finality is simply a structural weakness of television itself.

Do Most TV Shows Stick the Landing?

To assess the quality of television endings, we’ll compare each show’s IMDb finale rating with its average rating across earlier, non-final seasons.

For House of Cards, this calculation would go something like this:

• Average episode rating across first five seasons: 8.44

• Episode rating for the series finale: 2.6

• Finale’s difference from the show baseline: –69.2%

From there, we’ll sort each series into one of three buckets:

• Exceeds Expectations: The finale scores at least 10% higher than the show’s typical episode rating.

• Meets Expectations: The finale scores within 10% of the show’s typical episode rating, in either direction.

• Disaster: The finale scores at least 10% lower than the show’s typical episode rating.

To see this approach in action, consider the most popular “Exceeds Expectations” finales in recent memory, a list headlined by The Big Bang Theory, The Office, and Breaking Bad. Each of these shows ended on a high note, deepening viewer appreciation for the series as a whole.

And then there are the disaster endings: finales so deflating they make you question whether you should ever trust a TV show again. Somehow, I’ve been a fan of almost every series on this list, and can verify that these finales ruined my day, and sometimes my week. Game of Thrones, How I Met Your Mother, Dexter—I wish I had missed these endings because of a root canal or multi-day DMV appointment, or both. In fact, a root canal performed at the DMV could not surpass the ill will I have toward the finale of How I Met Your Mother.

Using our finale-quality metric, we can evaluate every series with a meaningful digital footprint to answer two key questions:

1. Do most shows end on a high note?

2. Have showrunners gotten better at sticking the landing?

The answers to these age-old conundrums are 1) “kind of” and 2) “yes.”

Across television history, 68% of finales meet expectations, 10% qualify as disasters, and 22% exceed viewer expectations. Better yet, finales appear to have improved over the past half-century, as disaster endings have become less common and exceptional conclusions have grown more frequent.

Television appears to have made meaningful progress in the art of endings, which raises a simple question: why?

The answer centers on program longevity, or rather, lack thereof.

How satisfying or enraging a finale feels depends heavily on when a show calls it quits. And paradoxically, the longer a show runs, the more likely its ending is to land at one of two extremes: exceeding expectations or imploding under the weight of them.

The greater fan investment—across years, sometimes decades—the stronger their reaction.

Before the streaming era, this narrative volatility was further compounded by the punishing pace of network television. Long-running hits from the 1980s and 1990s were mined for every last ounce of content: Cheers ran 11 seasons, ER ran 15, and M*A*S*H ran 11, each producing 22 episodes a year.

Week to week, episode quality could vary wildly. And nothing captured this uneven output better than “sweeps week.” In brief, “sweeps” were four Nielsen rating periods, traditionally held in November, February, May, and July, during which selected households recorded their viewing habits for Nielsen to tally. These results were then used to determine advertising rates.

As a result, showrunners were incentivized to create spectacle. They brought in buzzy guest stars, engineered cliffhangers, staged weddings and deaths, and produced novelty episodes that broke from a show’s normal rhythm.

What I always found strange about “sweeps week” was the implication that TV shows could simply choose to try harder. For a few weeks each year, every series became more dramatic, more expensive, and more desperate for attention, while the other 18 episodes received 75% of max effort.

Today, no such concept exists: shows run fewer seasons and feature fewer installments per season. Every episode matters.

And when a series does run longer, it has usually survived a much tougher gauntlet.

Among shows launched before 2022, we find that fewer programs make it to a second season, but those that do tend to produce better sophomore installments.

Taken together, these trends produce stronger finales: shows are less likely to linger for 11 seasons before limping toward an unsatisfying conclusion, and when a series does earn a second, third, or fourth season, its endurance is a testament to its quality.

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Final Thoughts: What About The Pitt?

I have only participated in a weekly watch party for one show, and unfortunately, that show was Game of Thrones. By the time I exited adolescence, few series justified real-time engagement; most programs were consumed via streaming or TiVo. Game of Thrones remained the lone exception, for fear of spoilers ruining that week’s episode.

I was late to Game of Thrones, catching up through epic binge-watching sessions on a series of business trips. While I hate assigning emotional resonance to the act of sitting alone in a hotel room, these 5-hour watch sessions were exhilarating. And then the finale happened.

I still remember the collective groan from our watch party as the finale unveiled one of its many frustrating twists. All those hours binge-watching the Targaryens and Jon Snow were retroactively ruined. While I try my best to avoid sunk cost thinking, my Game of Thrones investment will forever feel like an absolute waste.

Such is the agony and ecstasy of television. The longer a show runs, the greater our emotional investment and the more likely it is to thrill or enrage us. A show can run years, sometimes decades, but an outsized burden is placed on its very last episode.

Which brings me to The Pitt, arguably the best show on television right now—or at least my favorite. For some reason, I find simulated leg amputations and mangled limbs deeply satisfying (and apparently I’m not alone). But how much can I give to this show if I have no control over its resolution?

What if:

• The series’ main character becomes a villain, moving from ER Doctor to hedge fund manager, determined to drive the hospital out of business.

• The show loses its control of tone, and the characters look into the camera and say, “It’s Pitt-ing time!” Whenever an emergency trauma arrives.

• The entire series takes place inside a child’s mind as they stare at a snow globe of Pittsburgh.

Maybe the real goal of this analysis was reassurance: a reminder that disastrous endings are relatively rare, even if the worst finales loom large in our collective imagination. More often, a show’s conclusion will exceed expectations, or at least meet them, unless prolific showrunner Tommy Westphall finds a new way to disappoint us.

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Intro: 19th-Century Brain Rot

For the chronically online, the term “brain rot” is an affliction that defines our present moment: the product of a media ecosystem built on low-effort, hyper-stimulating content. Given the concept’s ever-growing relevance, I assumed its origin was also fairly recent—coined offhandedly by some BuzzFeed writer. But upon further research, I was surprised to learn that humanity’s struggle with “brain rot” dates back to the 19th century.

Published in 1854, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden includes a passage in which the author laments a society-wide softening of the mind. Ever the snob, Thoreau compares the public’s appetite for trivial ideas to an English potato blight: “While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot,” he asks, “will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”

One hundred and seventy years later, Oxford named brain rot its 2024 Word of the Year, narrowly beating out demure and romantasy. Well done, Henry David Thoreau. The term’s usage exploded in 2023, as large language models went mainstream and AI-generated content flooded the internet, with the worst of this garbage commonly dismissed as “AI slop.” The brain rot of 1854 concerned cheap literature and carnivalesque entertainment; the brain rot of 2026 is something newer, faster, and unnervingly synthetic. And as AI slop spreads across beloved social media platforms, so too does this metaphorical rot.

So today, we’ll investigate the prevalence of AI slop in modern media and the economic incentives that may help tame its spread.

How Much of the Internet Is AI Slop?

OpenAI launched ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. Prior to this milestone, the world’s understanding of machine intelligence was limited to AOL Instant Messenger bots, Microsoft’s Clippy, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. OpenAI’s major breakthrough was not simply building a powerful large language model, but making the technology accessible through a conversational interface. This overly agreeable bot could answer follow-up questions, admit mistakes, challenge faulty assumptions, and write a limerick about my dad’s favorite baseball player in the style of Dr. Seuss.

ChatGPT adeptly mimicked literature and speech, enabling its users to outsource one of humanity’s most annoying obligations: creating meaning by sequencing words into sentences, and then arranging those sentences into paragraphs.

Four years later, it appears human expression (or, rather, synthetic human expression) should require some additional friction.

According to a longitudinal study from the growth marketing agency Graphite, nearly half of newly published digital content appears to be AI-generated.

This chart comes with two caveats:

1. Graphite advertises itself as an AI-powered SEO agency, so its bleak portrait of content decay also supports its core business. Gross!

2. This graph would probably look different if weighted by web traffic—because human-created work still accounts for an outsized share of what people actually read.

Even if this chart is off by a factor of two, the underlying trend remains alarming.

This chart belongs to a canonical genre of data visualization, which I like to call “ChatGPT launched, and then a line goes up and to the right.”

Take literature, for example, where monthly Amazon e-book releases nearly tripled following ChatGPT’s introduction, a trend that roughly corroborates the Graphite study.

The reach of AI-produced text extends well beyond amateur authors peddling slop or SEO bloggers gaming search algorithms. Academia, a field tasked with expanding the boundaries of human knowledge, has also embraced machine intelligence. One Nature analysis measured the growing ratio of rejected to accepted scientific papers, offering another example of an LLM-induced supply shock: as writing becomes easier, submissions rise, and rejection rates follow. Here again, we see the same basic pattern—a near-tripling of productivity.

While the sheer volume of AI-generated text is concerning, it’s hard to tell how many of these synthetic articles, e-books, or papers are actually being consumed.

The same cannot be said of algorithmic social media feeds, where transitory engagement can snowball into widespread virality. According to a comprehensive study from video production firms Kapwing and NeoMam Studios, around 33% of all YouTube short-form videos qualify as brain rot (nonsensical, low-quality, but not necessarily AI-generated), while 21% are ostensibly AI-created.

This figure likely reflects the prevalence of slop across all short-form video platforms (including TikTok and Instagram), since these services have essentially converged on the same app design via ruthless copying.

At first glance, this study offers a glimpse into a post-truth media doom loop: Users fall prey to AI slop; social media platforms benefit from increased engagement, which, in turn, begets more slop. Ten years from now, every piece of online video content will be entirely synthetic, and digital life will be completely disconnected from our lived reality.

And that may well be true, though I have hope, and this hope comes in the form of an unlikely pro-truth ally: advertisers. Yes, as in the corporate marketers who gave us the GEICO gecko, Jake from State Farm, and Jared from Subway.

According to the same YouTube Shorts study, this nascent economy of video slop-spamming is already quite lucrative, with some channels collecting up to $4M in annual advertising revenue.

How could any of this be a good thing? If people are making millions of dollars from synthetically generated video, won’t that simply lead to more brain rot? Probably.

But these figures also mean that major advertisers like State Farm, GEICO, and Subway have allocated precious ad dollars to videos featuring seven-fingered humans and Komodo Dragons speaking Portuguese. At some point, these advertisers will require their promotions to air alongside non-GMO short-form video content.

A recent Digiday report captured this highly specific marketing anxiety: slop websites are increasingly appearing in programmatic ad networks, placing major brands alongside low-quality, AI-generated spam.

To be clear, I have little sympathy for programmatic ad buyers. But their demand for ROI and positive brand association does create an economic incentive for platforms to verify the humanity of larger accounts. Perhaps corporate marketers will induce some semblance of quality control, if not for consumers, then at least for the advertisers paying to reach them.

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Final Thoughts: Atari Slop, Circa 1984

If left unchecked, substandard product quality can do more than damage a single company; it can undermine faith in an entire medium. Consider the video game market of the early 1980s, a fledgling industry that tested the limits of consumer tolerance.

In the 1970s, Atari brought video gaming to the mainstream, starting with arcade games and later transitioning to consumer hardware. Atari’s overnight success opened the door to a chaotic wave of third-party development, as its consoles were flooded with low-effort games from opportunistic publishers like Quaker Oats, Purina, Johnson & Johnson, and Kool-Aid. Soon, the Atari ecosystem became a dumping ground for rushed movie tie-ins, barely functional curiosities, and low-grade cash grabs. It was during this period that the term “shovelware” emerged, which, in many ways, was the 1980s gaming equivalent of brain rot: cheap, low-effort entertainment that eroded trust in the platform.

The most infamous Atari disaster was an E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial game developed in just a few weeks for the holiday season. The game sold so poorly that Atari buried truckloads of unsold inventory in a landfill in New Mexico.

By 1984, the North American console market collapsed, and Atari was sold off by its corporate overseer, setting the company on a path toward dissolution just five years later. Nintendo later revived the gaming industry by implementing strict quality standards for third-party developers, as evidenced by its “Nintendo Seal of Quality.”

Contained within this single parable is both a cautionary tale about the hazards of subpar quality control and a solution to widespread slop-ification. The medium may be different, but the principles of a functional consumer marketplace remain the same—whether the product is video games or social media feeds.

After 35 years of chaotic expansion, the internet still runs on two basic business models: direct payment (through purchases and subscriptions) and advertising. In both cases, low-effort products may flourish briefly, but they rarely win out in the long term. Consumers can only be tricked into purchasing low-grade spam so many times, and advertisers will eventually pull spending if their offerings are marketed alongside shrimp-Jesus hallucinations and an incoherent cat telenovela where the characters speak a nonexistent language.

Which brings us to the concept of Maximum Allowable Slop (MAS), a term I just coined and one that will hopefully be my great contribution to the internet. Platforms like YouTube and Instagram will never fully eliminate AI garbage; the genie is out of the bottle. However, there exists a hypothetical tipping point of slop pervasiveness at which users lose interest, advertisers lose confidence, and platforms begin to lose money. Social media sites will have to do everything they can to stay below that threshold.

To return to Henry David Thoreau’s 170-year-old question, “Will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot?”—the answer, surprisingly, may be the free market. In the end, TikTok and YouTube will be forced to regulate their own ecosystems to ensure humanity does not exceed the maximum tolerable dose of brain rot. Which sounds like an exceptionally mediocre utopia.

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Intro: Cinema’s Totally-Real Revival

I’ve been writing this newsletter long enough that I can now revisit years-old essays with the benefit of hindsight. This is especially fun when an article ages poorly. Usually, it’s a stray sentence or chart that only I will notice. But every so often, subsequent real-world events render an entire piece meaningless.

And perhaps no essay has proven less predictive than my 2024 article “6 Reasons to Be (Cautiously) Optimistic About Movies in 2025.”

I would not recommend reading this piece, so I’ll provide a quick recap: I assessed the film industry’s post-pandemic woes, detailed six trends that signaled a return to pre-COVID moviegoing, and ended with an examination of the industry mantra “survive till ‘25”—a belief that if Hollywood could make it to 2025, some version of moviegoing equilibrium would be restored.

But 2025 came and went, and no great resurgence occurred. The box office was sluggish, Paramount imploded, Warner Bros. was put up for auction, and lizard king David Zaslav (Warner CEO) netted a cool $800M by running Hollywood’s oldest studio into the ground. The movies were not “so back.”

And now, four months into 2026, it seems like the movies may actually (kinda sorta) be “so back.” So here I am, once again, arguing that a theatrical resurgence is imminent—and once again, I have the data to prove it. This time, I’m right. No question.

So today, we’ll explore early signs of cinema’s totally-real revival, along with the persistent headwinds facing an industry that simply refuses to die—no matter what lizard king David Zaslav and lizard prince David Ellison throw its way.

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1. The Box Office Is Up (Finally) and Less Franchise-Dependent

Box office is an imperfect metric for evaluating the health of the film industry, just as GDP is an imperfect measure of human flourishing. But it’s the best metric we have for assessing the health of a capital-intensive business—and by that measure, things are moving in the right direction.

Year-to-date domestic box office is up after the down years of 2024 and 2025, which were dampened by protracted writers’ and actors’ strikes.

Better yet, of the 12 highest-grossing movies of 2026, 8 are unaffiliated with an existing franchise.

It pains me to include Michael among the standout “original” films on this list because:

1. It’s a music biopic, which is the lowest form of non-franchise filmmaking.

2. Who the subject is.

3. There will be a sequel about the second part of his life, which will probably skip some important sections of his Wikipedia page.

By the rules I’ve created, Michael technically counts.

This list will likely change over the coming months as the summer season delivers its usual wave of franchise entertainment. But for now, it offers a nice change of pace and a little hope.

2. More Movies Are Being Released in Theaters

So far, 2026 has delivered the most theatrical releases of the post-pandemic era, outpacing every post-COVID year by at least 13%. The industry is adapting to shifting moviegoer tastes and learning how to sell films outside the Marvel universe, with recent box office successes in horror, animation, Colleen Hoover adaptations, other smut-adjacent literary phenomena, and video game movies. The result is a faster pace of content development and a broader definition of what works in theaters.

Meanwhile, television production has slowed. English-language series output has declined every year since its 2022 peak, and the buzzy “prestige” shows that once drove subscriber growth have become far less plentiful.

To add insult to injury, streamer subscription prices have skyrocketed just as content output has declined.

Streaming’s golden age is most likely over, and audiences seem increasingly willing to return to theaters.

3. Online Interest in Movies Is Rising

This next point is somewhat abstract, so bear with me. You probably noticed that I cited streaming data as evidence of a moviegoing resurgence, suggesting a zero-sum struggle between film and television. And while this concept is rather squishy, I do believe this tug-of-war exists, at least to some extent.

In a crowded attention economy, TikTok, YouTube, AMC theaters, Netflix, and other platforms all compete for our time. To reduce this phenomenon to a single corporate buzzword, these pastimes are battling for mindshare.

So, in this hypothetical mind-battle between film and television, which medium occupies a greater portion of the collective consciousness? To quantify the zeitgeist, I looked at Wikipedia traffic—specifically, the share of movie- and TV-related pages that appear among the site’s 100 most-searched entries.

Over the past five years, film pages have captured an increasing share of Wikipedia search traffic, while TV’s share has grown more slowly.

One explanation for TV’s relative decline is that there are simply more TV series than there were 10 years ago, making it harder for any one show to break through. Or perhaps movies have always been better suited to capturing collective attention, while TV caters to fragmented niches. In the streaming era, hardly anyone watches the same thing at the same time, except for The Pitt and the NFL.

4. Netflix Is Warming Up to Theatrical Releases

You read that correctly: Netflix is giving Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Narnia adaptation a legitimate theatrical release. The film will play in theaters for at least 45 days before moving to streaming, and unlike a typical Netflix big-screen release, Gerwig’s movie will play in easy-to-find multiplexes at normal showtimes (rather than a single 12-seat theater on the outskirts of town at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday).

So why is Netflix backtracking after years of shunning brick-and-mortar exhibition? A few reasons:

1. Money: Netflix is a public company tasked with satisfying Wall Street’s demand for infinite revenue growth. Getting into theatrical exhibition is a net new revenue stream that will grow faster than its legacy subscription business.

2. Insider knowledge of Warner Bros. finances: For a few days in 2025, Netflix successfully purchased Warner Brothers, before lizard prince David Ellison usurped their bid using Saudi oil money. During this strange liminal period when they didn’t-not-own Warner Brothers, Netflix got a look into the finances of theatrical exhibition, and presumably liked what they saw. Before losing the acquisition to Paramount, Netflix promised to release Warner Brothers movies in theaters and touted the strength of the theatrical business model.

3. Improving filmmaking craft: A “Netflix movie” has become shorthand for subpar filmmaking. The streamer has excelled at replicating the low end of the market, such as Hallmark movies and middling romcoms, but has minted few breakthrough hits beyond the occasional KPop Demon Hunters. Arguably, the biggest driver of this filmmaking deficit is directorial talent.

   

   Established filmmakers like Greta Gerwig want to see their movies on the big screen and have avoided the service to secure theatrical commitments. The upcoming Narnia adaptation is the first time that the streamer has acquiesced to a director’s demand, and there is reason to believe that it may not be the last.

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5. The Oscars Have a Path to Cultural Relevancy (in 2029)!

As of this moment, the Oscars are down bad. Viewership has fallen precipitously, and the broadcast remains tied to a legacy cable model that makes the ceremony hard to watch for the average cord-cutter.

But that’s about to change! I think.

This past year, the Academy announced that the Oscars would move to YouTube in 2029, a far more accessible platform than your local ABC affiliate. YouTube is the sneaky winner of the streaming wars, capturing the largest share of TV viewing time by Nielsen estimates—and those figures don’t even include desktop viewing.

For a culturally diminished awards show, the move offers a much-needed lifeline: a chance to reinsert itself into the cultural conversation.

And then there’s gambling, which I don't approve of but which may prove beneficial to Oscar viewership. According to recent reports, the 2026 Oscars generated more than $120 million in bets on prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, and that number will likely grow as these platforms see increased adoption.

Is it bad that some people will find their way into movie culture through gambling? Absolutely. Has sports betting helped pro leagues like the NBA and NFL deepen fan engagement? Also yes. The Academy Awards have always possessed a horse-race quality, and in a world where people will gamble on almost anything, someone will inevitably commoditize this metaphorical horse race.

6. The Physical Media Revival Is Upon Us

In writing this newsletter, I have continually returned to the topic of physical media because every time I revisit the data, I find another proof point for its continued resurgence. Take this latest example: for the first time in 20 years, search traffic for DVD players has started to grow.

Obviously, this is still orders of magnitude removed from the DVD’s heyday, but it represents a minor reclamation for film nerds.

This revival is driven by demand for a more tangible movie culture—one where fans can own the things they love.

Boutique labels like Vinegar Syndrome, Arrow Video, and—most prominently—Criterion have turned Blu-ray collecting into a hobby for a certain kind of film obsessive, and rising search traffic suggests these brands are finding a wider audience.

DVDs will never return to the $16 billion market they were in 2008, but they can remain a thriving niche for cinephiles seeking cultural ownership.

Final Thoughts: Karma

When I was nine years old, I won an iPod in a school raffle. Being nine, I didn’t know much about MP3 players, Steve Jobs, or the sentimental value of physical media. I owned two CDs—Barenaked Ladies and Smash Mouth—which I played once a day. That was the full extent of my music-listening life.

iTunes expanded my cultural horizons to something bordering on infinite. I could sample nearly every song in existence for 30 seconds at a time, buy the tracks I liked, and carry them around in my pocket. Suddenly, my Barenaked Ladies CD was a relic—a reminder of the “before time,” when you had to buy 12 songs to hear a single hit track.

Music had migrated online, turning the industry’s remaining physical spaces into artifacts from a pre-digital world. Every Friday, my mom and I would go to the mall, and on these trips we developed a strange little pastime: marveling at the ever-decreasing foot traffic inside Tower Records. It became a recurring game between the two of us: “Does Tower Records still exist?” Each trip we’d bet on its continued presence, and each trip we’d marvel at its protracted demise.

At the time, I never considered the subculture that might disappear with the record store, or the people who would lose one of the places they loved most. Decades later, I’m on the other side of this equation, where the game is something akin to “Does film culture still exist?” It’s not a perfect comparison, but the broader anxiety is familiar. Moviegoing is no longer at the center of culture, and the rituals around it are increasingly fragile.

For now, film culture persists, sustained by a handful of benevolent upstarts who may, or may not, be on the precipice of enshittification: Letterboxd, A24, The Criterion Collection, Mubi, etc. Yet this remains a delicate balance. Each year feels like a referendum on the continued existence of a certain subculture: one that believes cinematic craft can be commercially viable. And as long as that’s the case, I’ll keep writing these articles, like a violinist going down with the Titanic.

A broken clock is right twice a day, so at some point I’ll be rewarded for my optimism—even if just for a little while. That is, until the lizards of Hollywood muck things up beyond recognition.

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1. Section 1: The Top Podcast Shows and Episodes

   1. Top Podcast Episodes: Last 14 Days

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2. Section 2: Top Podcast Categories

   1. Weekly Share of Top 100 Podcast Episodes by Category

   2. Weekly Share of Top 100 Podcast Shows by Category

Section 1: The Top Podcast Shows and Episodes

Top Podcast Episodes: Last 14 Days

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Intro: “If It’s in the Top 10, It Must Be Good.”

When choosing a TV show or movie, I tend to make the process harder than it needs to be. I’m burdened by the irrational belief that I should always be watching the best possible thing, which inevitably leads to endless research on Letterboxd and Metacritic. Quite frequently, I spend so much time searching for the perfect program that I end up watching nothing.

My wife, however, is unburdened by this self-imposed standard. She’ll gladly watch whatever Netflix places in front of her: Trainwreck: Poop Cruise, Squid Game: The Challenge, Too Hot to Handle, and other streaming curiosities. When I ask how she ultimately chose, say, a 6-part crime docuseries about the Amish, she usually offers the same rationale: it was in the Netflix Top 10. And when I tell her that this movie or show looks bad, she’ll shrug and say something like, “If it’s in the Top 10, it must be good.”

The conversation usually ends there because I can’t argue with the vague credibility of Netflix’s top ten titles—until now.

So today, we’ll examine whether Netflix’s Top 10 actually signals quality, how these hallowed content options stack up against other services, and whether you’re better off choosing a program at random.

Should You Trust the Netflix Top 10?

Digital marketplaces like Netflix, DoorDash, and Amazon often struggle with problems of abundance. Given a near-limitless catalog of restaurants or movies, consumers can suffer from analysis paralysis.

To address this champagne problem, tech companies employ hundreds of workers dedicated to “search and discovery.” The mandate of these teams is decidedly straightforward: get people to watch, click, or buy more stuff. Over time, these companies have converged on a familiar toolkit: personalized recommendations, improved search results, optimized thumbnails, and other subtle nudges designed to reduce friction.

In February 2020, Netflix added a new tool to this playbook: a daily list of the most popular shows and movies on its platform, displayed directly inside the app. The feature quickly became a hit, generating ongoing media coverage of its 10 trending titles and prompting other streaming services to create their own Top 10 lists.

But helping people choose faster is not the same as helping them choose better. So does the Netflix Top 10 actually lead viewers to better recommendations? Or does it simply make popular titles feel more worthwhile?

To answer one of streaming’s great conundrums, I pulled every Netflix Top 10 entry since the feature’s inception, along with its corresponding user rating on TMDB. By this measure, the average TV series trending in the Top 10 is approximately 1% more enjoyable than a non-trending Netflix title, yet still scores below the average series available on Paramount+, HBO, Disney+, or Hulu.

Within Netflix’s own ecosystem, the Top 10 offers a modestly useful signal of TV show quality. But once you compare Netflix against the broader streaming landscape, its trending titles are no better than an HBO or Paramount+ series chosen at random.

That said, this calculation only covers television. What about da’ movies—a business Netflix seems determined to drive into the ground?

Using the same methodology, we find that the average Netflix Top 10 movie is about 0.5% worse than a Netflix film that never earns this distinction. In fact, Netflix’s Top 10 films rank among the weakest content bundles in streaming, outperforming only Peacock, Prime Video, and AMC+.

Sometimes data can be beautiful, and in this case, quite amusing. For movies, landing in Netflix’s Top 10 seems to carry the cultural prestige of a middling Rotten Tomatoes score. Yikes.

This finding hints at an unflattering truth: Netflix heavily promotes its Originals across the platform, muscling them into the Top 10—and most of the streamer’s movies are quite bad.

Between 60% and 80% of Netflix’s Top 10 titles are Netflix Originals, meaning the chart effectively showcases the streamer’s best work. By that measure, Netflix’s output is getting worse: over the past six years, the average trending show has become less acclaimed, while its trending movies have remained consistently below average.

My best guess is that this pattern reflects Netflix’s pullback in spending as it pivots from growth to profitability, a process internet theorist Cory Doctorow has dubbed “enshittification.” The Top 10 no longer signals the best of streaming so much as the easiest content to manufacture: dating shows, celebrity documentaries, cooking contests, and numerous docuseries about Ted Bundy or the Menendez brothers.

Yet there’s also another possibility: maybe Netflix is still producing prestige films and shows, but they’re underrepresented on its best-of charts. So is the Top 10 actively boosting lower-quality titles at the expense of acclaimed programming? To test this, I flipped my analysis: instead of asking whether Top 10 titles are well regarded, I asked whether highly rated titles tend to perform better on the Top 10 charts.

By this measure, the more acclaimed a show or movie is, the worse it ranks within the Top 10.

Taken to its logical extreme, you’re better off choosing a show situated at #9 than one sitting at #2. If that conclusion sounds implausible, it should: our metric is being distorted by a major confounding variable—time.

Netflix’s biggest hits—Stranger Things, Adolescence, and Wednesday—all make the Top 10 and then stay there for weeks. As of this writing, KPop Demon Hunters has remained within the Top 10 for 46 straight weeks and currently sits at the #9 spot.

Which means that perhaps the most valuable indicator of content quality is not whether a show reaches the Top 10 or where it sits on the chart, but rather how long it remains there.

By this marker, the relationship between program acclaim and platform visibility is clear: higher-quality shows stay on the charts for longer.

Here lies a bizarre quirk of the Netflix Top 10 as a search-and-discovery tool: arguably its most useful piece of information—the amount of time a title persists on the chart—is not displayed in the app. Instead, viewers are shown a ranking that reflects a single moment in time, making the Top 10 less a marker of quality than a shortcut for decision-making.

Functionally speaking, the feature is no different from a promo code on Booking.com or an average star rating on Amazon: it reduces the friction of content discovery, making it easier to pick something and press play.

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Final Thoughts: All The Good Movies

When I was 11, I stumbled upon a TV special chronicling the American Film Institute’s 100 Greatest Movies. Enthralled, I watched it again the following week, printed out the full list, and vowed to watch every title before I turned 13. This proved somewhat problematic, since it meant seeing A Clockwork Orange and Silence of the Lambs well before my teenage years. But I persevered nonetheless. On a random Thursday, you’d find me watching Citizen Kane or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I was a pretty cool 12-year-old.

After working through the age-appropriate titles on AFI’s list, I moved on to Roger Ebert’s Great Movies book series, which eventually led me to critics like Pauline Kael and Richard Roeper. There was an endless archive of movies to discover, and these critics—with their well-argued recommendations—became guides in my quest to see All The Good Movies.

By today’s standards, however, this discovery process seems byzantine. You’d read the opinions of a few professional critics, ask friends what they thought, and then make an active effort to track the movie down. So much effort!

When Netflix arrived, it promised something more dynamic: personalized recommendations, tailored thumbnails, and a vast library organized around your preferences. It was Roger Ebert, AFI, IMDb, and Letterboxd folded into one product.

And yet people still struggled to find something to watch. They always have, and I guess they always will. It was at this point that some product manager figured they could increase platform conversion if they created a “trending” section, and thus the Netflix Top 10 was born.

This new feature promoted populism at the expense of personalization. All you really know is that other people are watching that thing—never mind if those people have completely different tastes. The end result is an amorphous recommendations tool that appears democratic, while remaining extremely easy for Netflix to shape.

But is there anything wrong with that? Depends on what you want from television.

Best I can tell, there is little difference between picking a show at random and choosing from the Netflix Top 10. If your goal is simply to watch something and pass the time, then great—this feature gets you there faster.

But if you believe, as I do, that you should always be watching the best possible thing, then “because it’s in the Top 10” is not much of a justification.

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Intro: The Imprecision of Genre

Technically speaking, the films Dumb and Dumber, White Chicks, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, Groundhog Day, Airplane!, and Dr. Strangelove all qualify as “comedies.” Taken in one sitting, however, they would make for an incomprehensible movie marathon. These films have almost nothing in common tonally or intellectually, except for one basic ambition: to make people laugh.

Such is the strange imprecision of genre. A label like “comedy” or “thriller” isn’t a strict definition so much as it is a signal—shorthand for a bundle of storytelling tropes that audiences recognize and actively seek out. A rom-com promises the thrill of a meet-cute and final kiss, a horror film provides scares in a controlled setting, and a musical offers spectacle and sensory pleasure. These categorizations serve as a heuristic, guiding moviegoers toward a desired emotional experience.

So what does it mean when the world’s oldest and most prolific genre enters a period of sustained decline?

For years, Film Twitter and Letterboxd devotees have lamented the death of the movie comedy. According to these online critics, laughter has been canceled, replaced by quippy Marvel slop and self-serious Vin Diesel car garbage. Yet while building a recent dashboard, I noticed an even sharper decline among dramas—one that significantly outpaces the demise of movie comedies.

After confirming that this dip was, indeed, legit, I set off on a new quest: to uncover the dramatic collapse of the studio drama.

So today, we’ll examine the case for and against the commercial viability of dramatic films, uncover the storytelling formats that have taken their place, and identify where the genre has found a new home.

The Case for Drama Films

The 1990s marked the peak of the modestly budgeted adult drama. Indie darling Good Will Hunting grossed $225 million on a $10 million budget, Sex, Lies, and Videotape earned $36 million on a $1.2 million budget, and The Brothers McMullen brought in $10 million on a budget of roughly $25,000. Distributors regularly scooped up these films at festivals like Sundance and successfully marketed them to moviegoers seeking small-scale, character-driven stories.

Which brings us to the first commercial advantage of the drama format: these films are inexpensive to produce.

Adjusted for inflation, dramas rank among the lowest-cost genres, surpassed only by ultra-low-budget horror.

The appeal of these films is not epic scale or intricately choreographed action. In the case of Good Will Hunting, it’s the charm of a janitor solving difficult math problems. In 1997, that concept drew thousands of people from their homes.

Good Will Hunting was eventually nominated for nine Oscars, winning two, and continues to rank among the top 250 films on sites like IMDb and Letterboxd.

Which brings us to the next artistic advantage of the movie drama: audiences tend to like them. The genre regularly outperforms other formats in online user ratings, and historically, 60% of Best Picture nominees have been primarily classified as dramas.

If you’re in search of prestige, because who needs money, then a low-budget drama is your best bet.

The genre’s precipitous decline does not square with its reputation. In a survey of 65,000 consumers that asked which genres they “want to see more of,” dramas consistently landed in the middle of the pack across all age groups. That’s not a sign of breakout demand, but it hardly suggests a format worthy of wholesale abandonment.

So, if these films are inexpensive, well-liked by viewers, and remain reasonably popular with general audiences, why are they disappearing from movie theaters and streaming services?

The Case Against Dramas Films

Over the last decade, studios have gravitated toward “genre filmmaking.” This label is confusing—because every film belongs to a genre—but in practice it’s shorthand for everything outside traditional comedies and dramas: action, horror, sci-fi, even rom-coms.

Historically, these “genre” categories were treated as niche, with limited audience potential. But not anymore.

When we look at the formats gaining ground in theaters and on streaming, the list is dominated by quintessential “genre” categories—horror, thriller, and sci-fi.

“Genre” films have long offered greater commercial upside, delivering a return on investment that far exceeds that of the prototypical drama, which ranks near the bottom of all formats.

And it gets worse. The comparison above is a relative percentage calculation, while studios ultimately care about absolute dollars. By that measure, dramas have the lowest box office ceiling, consistently grossing less than any other major format. Making $15M on a $10M budget sounds good on paper (50% ROI!!), but grossing $400M on a $225M budget will get you promoted ($175M ROI!).

A major driver of these commercial limitations is international box office. Dramas and comedies are dialogue-heavy and rely on cultural nuance that doesn’t always translate well abroad. As a result, these formats earn the majority of their box office revenue domestically.

You know what does translate well across all languages and continents? A gigantic dinosaur. Which is why we have seven Jurassic Park films and only one Manchester by the Sea or Requiem for a Dream.

In fact, among all sequels produced over the last 50 years, dramas consistently rank among the least represented—which is great because I don’t need films like Hamnet or The Brutalist to become a franchise.

Part of what makes dramas effective is their sense of finality. I love the final scene of The Social Network because it perfectly captures Mark Zuckerberg’s self-imposed isolation: he has created the world’s largest online community, yet remains profoundly alone, waiting for his ex-girlfriend to accept his friend request. Great ending! Story over, right? Nope! Unfortunately, a sequel called The Social Reckoning is set for release in late 2026. I will be obligated to see this movie, and it will almost certainly leave me bummed. Can’t wait!

And while The Social Network has aged well enough to justify a sequel 16 years later, most dramas tend to lose their cultural standing over time.

To be honest, I don’t have a perfect explanation for this next finding. I’m mostly beholden to the data, and the data suggests that dramas do not age well.

When we compare a movie’s average online rating across two separate periods—1995 to 2004 vs. 2018 to 2023—we find that comedy and drama films see a marked decline in appraisal over time.

My best guess is that these formats are tightly bound to contemporary taste. When I was a kid, I would watch Turner Classic Movies and try to appreciate films from the 1940s, only to find the exercise strangely difficult. I could admire them—in theory—but I struggled to experience these stories the way their original audiences did.

I feel similarly about many Oscar-bait dramas of the 1990s, including but not limited to: Chocolat, American Beauty, Shakespeare in Love, Scent of a Woman, The English Patient, and Life Is Beautiful. I simply don’t understand what contemporary audiences saw in these films.

Action and horror, meanwhile, have visceral elements that translate across generations: big dinosaurs, jump scares, campy set pieces, and other straightforward pleasures. The first ten minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark are timeless and feature almost no dialogue.

So if dramas age poorly, earn less, and rarely spawn sequels, do those limitations also carry over to other mediums? Are TV showrunners and playwrights abandoning the form as well? Not at all. If anything, theatrical dramas are simply migrating elsewhere.

Perhaps the most significant driver of the studio drama’s decline is the rise of prestige television. The format has exploded on streaming, where dramas now account for ~30% of all new series, well ahead of any other category.

Think of the most acclaimed dramatic series from the past five years—Adolescence, Beef, Mare of Easttown, Task. With a few tweaks, each could just as easily be a feature-length film. The increasingly blurry line between TV and film often comes down to a concept no one can quite define: theatricality.

A “theatrical” story is one that justifies leaving home for an overpriced ticket and tub of popcorn. Small-scale dramas rarely clear that bar anymore, and streamers like Netflix have capitalized on the gap. In the process, the genre’s perceived commercial viability has collapsed.

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Final Thoughts: Little Sads

During this year’s Oscars ceremony, host Conan O’Brien did an extended bit about “Little Sads,” his tongue-in-cheek term for short documentary films that tend to leave audiences “a little bit sad.” As a former film student, I found the label pretty accurate, though it applies just as neatly to plenty of feature-length dramas. Hamnet, Sentimental Value, Train Dreams, Nickel Boys, Past Lives, CODA, The Banshees of Inisherin—all of these films did, in fact, make me a little sad.

For the first 80 years of feature filmmaking, these “Little Sads” had a reliable theatrical audience. If you had asked me two decades ago, I would have assumed demand for the genre was evergreen. Then I went to the epicenter of Little Sadness: the Sundance Film Festival.

Once a hub of American movie culture, Sundance struck me as a film festival on its last legs. Most of the movies headlining the program had not been acquired for distribution, and the general moviegoing atmosphere was oddly subdued.

Then there were the movies themselves. Screening after screening, my dad and I sat through one Little Sad after another, each smaller and more melancholic than the last. By the final day, I couldn’t stomach another story about a fractured family or a middle-aged man processing his emotions. So we skipped our last Little Sad and saw a horror movie instead.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when people invoke the word objective in matters of taste. And yet—objectively—the experience of seeing that horror film in a packed theater was 800 times more enjoyable than our other screenings. Objectively!

Halfway through the movie, a jump scare caused someone in the audience to scream at the top of their lungs, prompting a burst of communal laughter from the rest of the theater.

If you asked which of these films I’d pay $17 to see in theaters, plus another $4 for Cookie Dough Bites, I’d pick the lone horror movie and nothing else. The rest I’d skip—or perhaps invoke one of the most dreaded phrases in modern entertainment: “I’ll wait for streaming.”

Am I drawing sweeping conclusions from a single film festival experience? Absolutely. But my takeaway seems to align with broader audience behavior. On the other hand, do I want theatrical dramas to go extinct? Not at all.

Some of my best movie-watching experiences involve being a little sad while seeing Lady Bird, Past Lives, Do the Right Thing, Boyhood, and Aftersun, among others. But at some point, audiences—myself included—decided this particular brand of sadness no longer needed to be experienced exclusively in movie theaters. We could be a little sad on the subway, at the gym, or while folding laundry, with this melancholy now spread across six to eight installments and multiple seasons.

Those seeking small doses of sadness can simply peruse the Netflix Top 10—or, on occasion, head to theaters for the next installment of The Social Network franchise.

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This page tracks activity across prominent prediction market platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket, offering a real-time view of what people think will happen next. The interactive charts and tables below highlight where attention (and money) is flowing, from the most active markets to newly trending bets to pop culture-driven speculation.

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1. Section 1: Top Markets on Kalshi and Polymarket

   1. Top Kalshi Prediction Markets: Last 7 Days

   2. Top Polymarket Prediction Markets: Last 7 Days

2. Section 2: Top Newly Trending Prediction Markets on Kalshi and Polymarket

   1. Top Newly Trending Kalshi Prediction Markets: Last 7 Days

   2. Top Newly Trending Polymarket Prediction Markets: Last 7 Days

3. Section 3: Top Pop Culture Prediction Markets on Kalshi and Polymarket

   1. Top Kalshi Pop Culture Prediction Markets: Last 7 Days

   2. Top Polymarket Pop Culture Prediction Markets: Last 7 Days

   3. Top Newly Trending Kalshi Pop Culture Prediction Markets: Last 7 Days

Section 1: Top Markets on Kalshi and Polymarket

Top Kalshi Prediction Markets: Last 7 Days

• What This Chart Shows: Top Kalshi prediction markets sorted by recent trading volume.

• Data Source: Kalshi API

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Top Polymarket Prediction Markets: Last 7 Days

• What This Chart Shows: Top Polymarket prediction markets sorted by recent trading volume.

• Data Source: Polymarket API

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Intro: The Near-Demise of Disney

In the late 1980s, Disney was on the precipice of bankruptcy. After the deaths of Walt Disney and his brother Roy O. Disney, the company had drifted creatively, culminating in the disastrous 1985 release of The Black Cauldron. The ambitious sword-and-sorcery epic was the most expensive film in the studio’s history—and, subsequently, a high-profile flop, losing roughly $70 million in today’s dollars.

Following The Black Cauldron’s failure, many predicted that the long-suffering conglomerate was nearing its end, as Wall Street raiders began launching takeover bids to gut the company.

Underlying the turmoil was a growing belief within Hollywood that feature animation—the medium Disney had brought to the mainstream with Snow White—was no longer commercially viable. To many, the idea that a major studio could build its future around animated films or family entertainment felt increasingly untenable.

Obviously, that consensus did not age well. In 2024, Disney-Pixar’s Inside Out 2 was the year’s highest-grossing film, while Zootopia 2 carried the company to yet another box office win in 2025. In fact, entertainment aimed at younger audiences has become one of the last bastions of box office stability, justifying continued investment in an uncertain post-pandemic movie landscape.

So today, we’ll explore the commercial resurgence of children’s entertainment, the volatile economics underpinning the genre, and the format’s uncertain future.

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How Kids’ Movies Became Hollywood’s Most Reliable Bet

For the purposes of this analysis, we’ll combine the “family” and “animation” genres into a single category of children’s entertainment, using both terms interchangeably. Got it? Great!

The first thing you’ll want to know about this family film category is that it’s among Hollywood’s most profitable theatrical formats, generating a return on investment comparable to that of the horror genre.

What’s especially notable here is that horror movies generate a 3x return on a ~$10M budget, while an animated film is tripling a budget five to ten times that amount. Amid post-pandemic volatility, this asymmetric upside has helped family films remain a core pillar of studio slates.

Yet the family film wasn’t always a box office juggernaut. The genre’s enduring dominance was shaped through two commercial renaissances:

1. Disney’s Revival in the 1990s: After a string of flops in the 1980s, Disney reversed its fortunes with the release of The Little Mermaid. The film became a massive commercial success, launching a new era for the studio and popularizing the name Ariel for decades. The company built on this momentum with a run of generational classics—like Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Pocahontas, and Mulan—that reestablished animation as a dominant box office force.

2. The Rise of Pixar: In 1995, Pixar’s Toy Story stunned audiences with its groundbreaking computer animation, ushering in a new era for the medium. The film laid the foundation for an extraordinary run of Pixar hits, including WALL·E, Ratatouille, and Up!.

Each paradigm shift further cemented children’s entertainment as a cornerstone of the modern box office. By the end of Pixar’s late-2000s hot streak, family films routinely accounted for 30 to 40 percent of the year’s 25 highest-grossing releases.

Financially, the genre has a high floor and an almost unlimited ceiling. While creative execution matters, the format’s durability is underpinned by two behavioral forces outside Hollywood’s control:

1. Parents of young children want to leave the house when given the chance, because toddlers aren’t exactly wired for Netflix & chill.

2. Once you leave the house, you want an activity that will hold your child’s attention for an hour or two, ideally offering a brief reprieve from constant supervision.

If this explanation reads as reductive, it’s because the logic really is that simple.

Given considerable built-in demand, you’d expect the genre to expand indefinitely, churning out a growing slate of family blockbusters. And yet it hasn’t.

Around 2010, the genre’s release volume plateaued, and in recent years, the number of family films has plummeted (Note: these figures include streaming movies).

The clearest explanation for the genre’s stagnation is cost. These films are expensive to produce, with inflation-adjusted budgets that place family releases in the same high-cost tier as sci-fi and fantasy.

In an increasingly risk-averse Hollywood landscape, children’s entertainment has become an all-or-nothing proposition. The average family film now ranks among the industry’s most expensive bets, with a growing share of projects carrying inflation-adjusted budgets above $75 million. These films must then generate correspondingly large box office returns to justify the investment.

There is ample demand for children’s entertainment, yet the genre has been squeezed into a narrow economic mold, mirroring Hollywood’s broader reliance on franchises and reboots. Disney now leans heavily on animated sequels like Inside Out 2, Zootopia 2, and Moana 2, alongside live-action remakes that everyone hates but still manage to make $1B (Mulan, The Lion King, and also Moana).

So where does the genre go from here? The most likely outcome is a meaningful uptick in children’s films, driven by their outsized box office returns and, more recently, their strong performance on streaming platforms.

Each week, the analytics firm Nielsen publishes a ranking of the most-watched shows and movies on streaming platforms. Among the top films on streaming since 2024, a clear pattern emerges: every movie is aimed at children.

If your kid wants to watch Moana or the Minions for yet another week, that is yet another week that you will remain subscribed to Disney+ or Peacock. Congratulations.

Meanwhile, Netflix finally made a successful kids’ film (Kpop Demon Hunters) while Disney is running out of IP to tarnish. Together, these shifts could open the door to a new wave of children’s entertainment built on original stories and modest budgets. Or so I hope.

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Final Thoughts: Nostalgia for Deceptive Garbage

When I was a kid, I saw a movie trailer that featured a rapping CGI kangaroo. Being young and animal-obsessed, I was enamored. It was at this moment that I vowed to see Kangaroo Jack, and spent several days lobbying my mom to take me to this marsupial-centric crime comedy. When I finally saw the film, I was shocked to discover that the rapping kangaroo only appeared in a 30-second dream sequence, and that the movie was really about two human thieves whose stolen money gets swiped by a thoroughly non-musical kangaroo.

As the film reached its conclusion, I realized I’d been duped. And, as it turns out, I wasn’t alone. Internet lore tells of a group of aggrieved Kangaroo Jack viewers who banded together to sue the distributor for false advertising. Turns out the movie was originally shot as an R-rated mob comedy called Down and Under, before disastrous test screenings led producers to rework it into a PG family film, retrofitted around a hastily-inserted CGI kangaroo (which became central to its marketing). Yikes!

In writing this article, I found myself thinking about Kangaroo Jack often, and, somewhat unexpectedly, feeling nostalgic for this deceptive piece of garbage. Though in actuality, I’m nostalgic for what this deceptive piece of garbage represents.

Family films used to benefit from a perceived unimportance. Hollywood wasn’t relying on the genre to carry the box office, so a half-baked project like Kangaroo Jack could be tossed into theaters without much consequence because these movies didn’t require $2 billion in revenue to justify their existence. This period saw fewer sequels, more risk-taking, and, inevitably, more misses. Kangaroo Jack isn’t redeeming on its own merits—because, well, it’s terrible—it’s simply the opposite of everything family filmmaking has become.

Hollywood runs on cycles of imitation and exhaustion. A format or concept proves itself, the industry attempts to templatize that success, and abundant mechanization eventually strips that storytelling concept of its original appeal. Contrary to the Disney naysayers of the 1980s, children’s entertainment is alive and well. Whether the format survives its own success is another question.

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The Stat Significant Movie Report 🎬

This page tracks which movies are capturing audience attention across theaters, streaming services, and online platforms. The interactive charts and tables below highlight the films generating the most engagement—from review activity and box office performance to trailer views and pre-release buzz.

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1. Section 1: The Most-Watched Films in Theaters and on Streaming

   1. The Most Reviewed Movies Online: Last 7 Days

   2. The Most Reviewed Movies Online: This Year

   3. Which Movies Are Performing Best on Streaming, According to Nielsen?

   4. Which Older Movies Dominate Online Activity?

2. Section 2: Box Office — This Year and Historical

   1. The Highest-Grossing Movies of the Year

   2. The Highest-Grossing Movies of All Time

3. Section 3: Most Anticipated Movies

   1. Most Anticipated Movies: According to Recent Online Traffic

   2. Most-Viewed Movie Trailers

4. Section 4: Genre Prevalence and Performance

   1. Genre Share of Movies Released by Year

   2. Financial Performance by Genre

Section 1: The Most-Watched Films in Theaters and on Streaming

The Most Reviewed Movies Online: Last 7 Days

• What This Chart Shows: The films with the most online reviews published over the past week. Review volume is indexed from 1 to 100, with 100 representing the highest volume.

• Data Source: TMDB online review volume.

• Data Update Frequency: Every 2 days. || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

The Most Reviewed Movies Online: This Year

• What This Chart Shows: The films with the most online reviews published during this calendar year. Review volume is indexed from 1 to 100, with 100 representing the highest volume.

• Data Source: TMDB online review volume.

• Data Update Frequency: Every 2 days. || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

Which Movies Are Performing Best on Streaming, According to Nielsen?

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Intro: New Music is Bad Music

Past a certain age, all new music starts to sound like bad music. For as long as pop has existed, there has been a reliable cohort of older listeners ready to dismiss today’s Top 40 as inferior. According to these elders, the best art was made—quite conveniently—when they were between the ages of 13 and 26. Anything outside this window is judged, by some vague and unverifiable standard, to be worse.

This generational bias is easily quantified. In a 2021 YouGov poll, respondents of varying ages were surveyed on their favorite musical era. Each generation—predictably, and quite stubbornly—chose the music of their youth.

In other words, whether modern music is good or bad depends on who you ask. Or does it?

Recently, while analyzing some Spotify Top 50 data, I noticed that newly released songs were losing popularity. If this reads as vague, know that’s intentional, since we’ll delve into the specifics shortly. As I dug deeper into the charts, a larger question emerged: how can we systematically measure the relevance of Top 40? Are newly released songs losing their cultural foothold, or is our perception distorted by confounding variables? Given the subjectivity of music taste, can we meaningfully evaluate whether the songs of 2026 are less loved than those of 1975?

So today, we’ll examine the case for and against the continued relevance of newly released music, and consider what our findings signify for aspiring musicians and listeners clinging to the songs of their youth.

The Case for New Music’s Growing Popularity

In the 20th century, owning a chart-topping song meant buying an entire album—purchasing a bundle of 10 to 14 tunes to get one hit track. This changed with the introduction of digital distribution, which enabled single-song consumption on platforms like iTunes and Spotify. Today, one hit song can function as a standalone commercial enterprise, garnering billions of streams on Apple Music and YouTube.

Much of this shift reflects a longstanding listener preference: when given the option, consumers prefer to pick and choose songs across artists and albums—a dynamic the industry has increasingly rewarded. Since the Billboard Hot 100 launched in 1958, record labels and distributors have steadily shifted from maximizing album sales to extending the commercial lifespan of individual hits. As a result, the average Billboard-charting song has nearly doubled its stay on the Hot 100.

So what does this trend mean in practice? First, and perhaps quite confoundingly, the most commercially successful songs in recorded pop history are simply the newest ones. Case in point: “Lose Control” by Teddy Swims spent a combined 112 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100—spanning both a summer and winter Olympics—making it the longest-tenured track in the chart’s 70-year history.

Had you given me a blind taste test to identify the most consumed song in music history, I would not have picked “Lose Control” over “Hey Jude” or “Respect.” So yeah, you heard it here first: Teddy Swims tops The Beatles. As does LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem”, which is a song that—checks notes—really stinks.

So how do we reconcile Swims’ chart-topping dominance with the reality that he did not write a song better than “I Will Always Love You” or “Bohemian Rhapsody”? The answer is momentum. When a modern song—or a cluster of songs—catches on, it’s amplified throughout the streaming ecosystem via playlist curation and, most powerfully, through algorithmic recommendations. Success compounds, making big-name releases that much bigger.

When we examine the artists with the most Billboard-charting songs of all time, our list is dominated by contemporary acts at the peak of their powers, like Taylor Swift, Morgan Wallen, and The Weeknd.

We can attribute this hierarchy to a phenomenon I’ll call the New Music Friday Effect. In the streaming era, new music is typically released on Friday, as codified by Spotify’s prominent New Music Friday playlist. I’ve always found this decision counterintuitive, since streaming activity is much higher during the week when people are working, but whatever, some nerd at Spotify arbitrarily chose Friday, and the music industry recalibrated itself around this decision. So it goes.

Major artists have adapted to this condensed release timeline by building anticipation ahead of Friday drops and using playlist placement as a major accelerant. If you checked a trending music playlist from October 2025, you’d see Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl overtaking the charts. Instead of slowly rolling out singles, Swift can release a full album at once and let the algorithmic hype machine handle much of the promotional work.

So does this mean newer music is actually more popular? Yes and no. Recent releases can dominate attention for months, and sometimes years, but that success is concentrated among a narrow class of superstars and mega-hits. The Taylor Swifts, Drakes, and Morgan Wallens of the world benefit enormously from New Music Friday and the playlist ecosystem. But the rise of this elite tier has come at the expense of smaller acts trying to break through.

Working-class musicians must contend with a Taylor Swift track released four months ago, and, quite surprisingly, a Fleetwood Mac song from the late 1970s or Radiohead’s “Creep” from the mid-1990s.

The Case for New Music’s Declining Popularity

Spotify’s marquee charts and playlists are heavily informed by listener demographics. The platform’s earliest adopters skewed younger, giving contemporary hits an outsized presence on the streamer—particularly youth-driven genres like hip-hop. But as Spotify scaled, older cohorts began reshaping its streaming ecosystem, lifting classic rock and late-20th-century alternative into heavy rotation. By 2025, roughly 30% of listeners were over 45, a meaningful shift from the platform’s early user base.

So what does this mean in practice? Well, over the past five years, a growing share of Spotify’s Top 100 has gone to decades-old tracks like The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.” Each holiday season, the platform sees a pronounced spike in Christmas classics, followed by a sustained rise in canonical hits from The Killers and Radiohead.

As of this writing, the following songs have made Spotify’s Top 50 almost every day for the last three months:

• “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers (2004)

• “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac (1977)

• “Iris” by Goo Goo Dolls (1998)

• “Creep” by Radiohead (1992)

• “Sweater Weather” by The Neighbourhood (2012)

• "505" by Arctic Monkeys (2007)

To recap, we’ve observed two parallel forces reshaping modern music consumption over the last decade:

1. Elite artists and mega-hits are occupying an ever-growing share of charts and playlists.

2. Older songs are increasingly durable within the streaming zeitgeist.

Taken together, these structural shifts have effectively boxed out a proverbial “middle class” of mainstream musicians. Without the momentum of existing celebrity or nostalgia, new songs struggle to gain a foothold on streaming platforms.

These dynamics have led to a drastic increase in the average time a track trends in Spotify’s Top 50, while also resulting in a significant dip in the number of new songs charting each year.

There are countless ways to illustrate the erosion of novelty within mainstream culture, but I chose to approach this particular issue through the prism of my favorite musical phenomenon: the one-hit wonder.

The one-hit wonder has given us so much: The Macarena, The Cotton-Eyed Joe, 867-5309, and What Does the Fox Say? Few things inject more novelty into a dance party than a hit song from an artist devoid of long-term commercial staying power. Yet the one-hit wonder may be a thing of the past. As of 2021, the share of one-time entrants on the Billboard Hot 100 has fallen to an all-time low.

The one-hit wonder represents an extreme case of fleeting music stardom, while also serving as an effective proxy for a vast middle class of musicians boxed out of the Top 40. In a landscape dominated by elite superstars and nostalgic hits, how does anyone break through?

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Final Thoughts: What Controls the Zeitgeist?

Popularized in the late 19th century, the German word Zeitgeist describes the defining cultural climate and artistic touchstones of a given era. The term’s usage expanded throughout the 20th century to interrogate the rise of mass-distributed media like recorded music, big-budget filmmaking, nationally syndicated newspapers, and broadcast television. Prior to the digital age, the zeitgeist was heavily shaped by intermediaries, including radio DJs, studio executives, record labels, journalists, and culture critics.

The 21st century promised disintermediation—with digital platforms like Spotify connecting artists and listeners directly, absent gatekeepers. In theory, collective preference would emerge organically, expressed through algorithmic recommendations.

At their core, algorithms are designed to give us what we want, often serving as a mirror of our collective id—revealing unfortunate truths hiding in plain sight. In the case of new music, algorithmic curation suggests that we may have long overvalued novelty. In a flattened digital landscape, absent critics and DJs, listeners tend to default to inertia—gravitating toward nostalgic favorites or months-old Taylor Swift songs rather than taking a chance on something new. Perhaps the zeitgeist isn’t always defined by recency.

I have mixed feelings about these trends:

• On the one hand, all musicians should be able to make a living. More novelty is good. Art matters. We shouldn’t get lost in abstractions because some of the best moments of our lives are soundtracked to music.

• On the other hand, there may have been a musical middle class propped up by invasive radio curation and record label lobbying. Now, in an unmediated digital marketplace, these acts no longer get their 15 minutes in the zeitgeist.

Perhaps the next generation of listeners will be the first to favor a different cohort’s music. Maybe Gen Beta and Baby Boomers will converge on the same cultural consensus: that new music isn’t the best music. Whether that’s a sign of progress or stagnation depends on who you ask.

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Stat Significant’s Wikipedia Traffic Trends Report 📕

This page tracks trends across Wikipedia—surfacing the pages and topics capturing global attention right now. The interactive charts and tables below explore search behavior, breakout interest, and historical viewership, providing a real-time survey of the cultural zeitgeist as reflected through Wikipedia traffic.

All visuals are updated regularly, with new data added daily and weekly. When available, click “Get Data” at the bottom of a chart to download the underlying dataset.

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Table of Contents

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1. Section 1: Recent Wikipedia Search Trends

   1. The Most-Visited Wikipedia Pages in the Last 7 Days

   2. First-Time Pages Trending in the Top 100 (Last 7 Days)

   3. The Most-Visited Pop Culture Wikipedia Pages in the Last 7 Days

2. Section 2: Historical Wikipedia Search Trends

   1. Most-Visited Wikipedia Pages this Year

   2. Most-Visited Wikipedia Pages All Time

   3. Wikipedia Pages with the Most Views in a Single Day

Section 1: Recent Wikipedia Search Trends

The Most-Visited Wikipedia Pages in the Last 7 Days

• What This Chart Shows: Wikipedia pages ranked by the number of days spent in the Top 100 and by daily traffic over the last 7 days.

• Data Source: Wikipedia API

• Data Update Frequency: Daily || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

First-Time Pages Trending in the Top 100 (Last 7 Days)

• What This Chart Shows: Wikipedia pages making their first-ever appearances in the Top 100 most-viewed list, ranked by days trending and traffic over the last 7 days.

• Data Source: Wikipedia API

• Data Update Frequency: Daily || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

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• Most-Visited Pop Culture Wikipedia Pages in the Last 7 Days

• Most-Visited Wikipedia Pages this Year

• Most-Visited Wikipedia Pages All Time

• Wikipedia Pages with the Most Views in a Single Day

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Stat Significant’s Online Trends Report 🖥️

This page tracks trends across Google, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube—surfacing the topics and pop culture phenomena capturing our attention right now. The interactive charts and tables below explore search behavior, social media mentions, and trending videos, providing a real-time view of the cultural zeitgeist.

All visuals are updated regularly, with new data added daily and weekly. When available, click “Get Data” at the bottom of a chart to download the underlying dataset.

Because many of the graphics below are interactive, this page is best viewed on the web rather than in an email client or the Substack app.

Table of Contents

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1. Section 1: Trending on YouTube

   1. Top Film & TV Videos Trending on YouTube in the Last 15 Days

   2. Top Music Videos Trending on YouTube in the Last 15 Days

2. Section 2: Trending on Google

   1. The Top Search Terms Trending on Google: Last 10 Days

   2. The Top Entertainment Search Terms Trending on Google: Last 10 Days

3. Section 3: Trending on TikTok

   1. Top Trending Hashtags on TikTok: Last 7 Days

4. Section 4: Trending on Wikipedia

   1. The Most-Visited Pop Culture Wikipedia Pages in the Last 7 Days

5. Section 5: Trending on TikTok

   1. The Top Topics on Twitter: Last 7 Days

6. Section 6: Trending on Reddit

   1. Most Discussed Movies on Reddit: Last 30 Days

   2. Most Discussed TV Shows on Reddit: Last 30 Days

   3. Most Discussed Music Acts on Reddit: Last 30 Days

Section 1: Trending on YouTube

Top Film & TV Videos Trending on YouTube in the Last 15 Days

• What This Chart Shows: The top trending film & TV videos on YouTube, sorted by peak trending rank and number of days trending.

• Data Source: YouTube API

• Data Update Frequency: Daily. || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

Top Music Videos Trending on YouTube in the Last 15 Days

• What This Chart Shows: The top trending music videos on YouTube, sorted by peak trending rank and number of days trending.

• Data Source: YouTube API

• Data Update Frequency: Daily. || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

Section 2: Trending on Google

The Top Search Terms Trending on Google: Last 10 Days

• What This Chart Shows: The top search terms trending on Google in the last 10 days.

• Data Source: Google Trends API

• Data Update Frequency: Daily || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

The Top Entertainment Search Terms Trending on Google: Last 10 Days

• What This Chart Shows: The top entertainment-related search terms trending on Google in the last 10 days.

• Data Source: Google Trends API

• Data Update Frequency: Daily || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

The Deep Dive: For Paying Subscribers

We also reserve several charts for paying subscribers, including:

• Trending on Wikipedia

• Trending on Twitter

• Trending Movies on Reddit

• Trending TV Shows on Reddit

• Trending Music Acts on Reddit

These views update daily or weekly, are fully interactive, and include downloadable data.

Read more

Today’s essay uses data from Stat Significant’s Streaming Report—a suite of interactive charts, updated weekly, that tracks what people actually watch across streaming. You can explore The Streaming Report’s 20+ deep-dive graphics here.

Intro: Awe-Inspiring

The mythologist Joseph Campbell once wrote, “Awe is what moves us forward,” while astronaut Neil Armstrong mused that, “Mystery creates wonder, and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand.” I could pile on more awe-centric quotes, but the gist is this: the universe is unknowable, filled with endless mystery for mortals and data journalists alike. Just when I understand the machinations of our big, beautiful planet and its cultural patterns, I review some streaming data and realize I know nothing.

Such was the case while building a recent streaming dashboard, where I discovered that the most valuable show on television isn’t Stranger Things, Squid Game, or even the Sopranos back-catalog, but an Australian kid’s cartoon about a dog named Bluey. For parents of young children, this is painfully obvious. For everyone else, it’s surprising, perhaps even awe-inspiring for how little we know.

Bluey’s success is one of the great case studies of the streaming era—a show that reveals what people actually want from television and the fundamental shortcomings of the platform that hosts it. That an Australian children’s cartoon became Disney+’s biggest hit is, paradoxically, a testament to everything the century-old conglomerate gets wrong.

So today, we’ll dig into the Bluey phenomenon, explore the unexpected winners of the streaming wars, and examine what the show’s success reveals about Disney’s strategic failures.

Why Bluey is the Biggest Show on Television

Bluey was originally commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), where it premiered on public television in October 2018. In 2019, Disney struck a deal with ABC and BBC Studios to acquire international broadcasting and streaming rights, and the show made its way onto Disney+ when the platform launched in early 2020. What followed was beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.

Every week since late 2023, Nielsen has published a ranking of the 10 most-streamed programs in the U.S. Over the past three months, Bluey has appeared on this chart every single week, demonstrating a level of staying power that far exceeds prestige hits like The Pitt and Landman.

But wait, there’s more: across the 101 weeks captured in this Nielsen Top 10 dataset, Bluey has appeared on the chart a staggering 100 times.

The next-closest shows are Grey’s Anatomy, NCIS, Family Guy, and Bob’s Burgers—all syndicated content with deep back catalogs whose popularity predates streaming. Only further down the list do true streaming-era hits begin to appear, like Love is Blind, Landman, and Reacher.

Bluey’s success—and the success of other Nielsen mainstays offers two lessons for TV tastemakers:

1. The Power of Children’s Programming: Bluey, SpongeBob, Family Guy, and Bob’s Burgers are widely consumed by adolescents and teenagers. These shows have extensive episode catalogs that lend themselves to binge-watching. I exhibited the same behavior when I was a kid, except I was consuming reruns of Full House and Boy Meets World when I got home from school.

2. Syndication’s Silent Streaming Domination: Coverage of the streaming wars is hyperfixated on new and expensive series like Stranger Things and Masters of the Air, but in reality, an outsized share of viewership goes to long-running cable shows dumped on streaming services.

Indeed, when we look at the breakdown of Nielsen-charting programs by content type, around 60% to 70% of spots go to syndicated programs like Grey’s Anatomy and Bluey.

In a TV landscape dominated by long-running, widely recognizable programs, Disney has stumbled onto the ultimate prize. At first glance, it looks like a major win for the Mouse House—but beneath the surface, Bluey’s success reveals deeper strategic shortcomings.

Despite its vast film library and unmatched brand recognition, Disney—along with its subsidiary Hulu—is a distant third in streaming viewership and has ceded meaningful audience share since 2022.

Even with the single biggest program on streaming, Disney draws half the viewership of Netflix—a gap made even more glaring by one inconvenient detail: Disney doesn’t own Bluey. One recent estimate suggests the Australian series accounts for 29% of all Disney+ watch time, which raises an uncomfortable question: if Bluey were to run away, how much of that audience would leave with it?

In fact, since late 2023, the top shows on Disney+ and Hulu have been dominated by syndicated staples like Bluey and Grey’s Anatomy—with the latter program also licensed to Netflix—while streaming-first hits like Andor and The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives draw far less viewership.

On paper, this seems like a win: if syndication and familiarity are the secret sauce, Disney can keep licensing decades-old shows that toddlers and teenagers will happily binge.

But beneath this ostensible advantage lies Disney’s core problem—one that cuts across both film and television: the hundred-year-old conglomerate struggles to create anything new. At some point, this lack of innovation will cause problems for Disney. For example, what would happen if Bluey secedes from Disney and launches its own service called Bluey+ Max?

Historically, Disney+ and Hulu have captured a combined 25% of Nielsen’s Top 10 streaming chart. But if Bluey were to leave the platform and we exclude titles that make the chart while on multiple services (e.g., streaming on Netflix and Disney+ at the same time), that combined share drops to 8.4%.

Streaming subscriptions thrive on week-to-week engagement. If your kid is a Bluey-holic and craves their daily or weekly dose of adorable Australian canine, then you will remain a Disney+ subscriber until your child moves on to Family Guy or goes to college.

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Final Thoughts: The Allure of Glowing Tablets

I recently had a kid (yay!), and one day I brought him into my office to bounce in his BabyBjörn while I answered a few emails—because parents can have it all. After a few minutes of bouncing, I noticed something strange: complete silence. No coos, no giggles, no fussing. I looked up and saw him locked onto my desktop monitor, wide-eyed and perfectly still—captivated by his first-ever screen.

Then came a familiar wave of good old-fashioned parent guilt. Was he supposed to be looking at screens this young? Was I rewiring his brain in real time? Had I compromised his analog purity? I had no good answer to these questions, so I turned him away from the monitor, at which point he started to fuss.

It was at this moment that I realized how easy it would be to turn him around and pacify him with a screen, and how this impulse would remain evergreen: from toddlerhood with Bluey to adulthood with NCIS and Grey’s Anatomy.

I am not advocating for or against screens as part of someone’s parenting philosophy. What I can say is that there is probably some deep-seated drive associated with glowing tablets, not unlike the instinctive comfort of sucking, rocking, and white noise.

But the pull of screens is only part of the story. Equally important is what we choose to watch on them. The streaming wars have trained us to value novelty above all else—to subscribe for the latest prestige release. Yet so much of this programming is strangely disposable. We race through a buzzy limited series, talk about it for a week, and then move on to the next new thing, rarely to return.

Yet hiding in plain sight is an entirely different class of TV programming defined not by novelty, but by abundance and familiarity—call it comfort viewing. For this silent majority, lack of newness is an asset, as is volume. Shows like The Office and Friends endure because they soothe us, filling time and regulating mood (by way of glowing tablet).

Perhaps familiarity is more powerful than awe, or at least more than we care to admit. In this light, Disney is actually well-positioned for a streaming landscape built around comfort consumption, serving us reheated leftovers and licensing binge-able commodities. Audiences aren’t chasing astonishment every time they press play. More often than not, they just want to be pacified by their old friends—Peter Griffin, Sheldon (both young and old), Meredith Grey, and, of course, Bluey.

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Now Live: New Data Hubs for Tracking Music Trends

Today’s essay on hip-hop uses data from two of Stat Significant’s interactive data hubs:

1. The Spotify & TikTok Trend Report: a real-time view of the songs, artists, genres, and styles dominating Spotify and TikTok. And the older hits that refuse to fade.

2. A History of Popular Music: a deep dive into music history, Billboard chart performance, genre trends, and song composition.

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Intro: Kendrick Curiosity

Traditionally speaking, the Super Bowl halftime show is designed for people in their mid-thirties. Each year’s headliner must carry broad name recognition, spark nostalgia, and—most importantly—appeal to the demographic advertisers value most. In many cases, this honor functions as a late-career coronation, a sign that an artist’s cultural peak has passed. If pop music thrives on novelty, the Super Bowl stands as the opposite.

Yet in 2025, the NFL defied conventional wisdom by selecting Kendrick Lamar as its Super Bowl headliner. Here was an artist at the peak of his powers, a few years removed from a Pulitzer Prize, and months removed from a feud with Drake that consumed the internet.

In the aftermath of the 2025 halftime show, my dad—a culturally curious Baby Boomer—took a sudden interest in Kendrick Lamar, sending me a stream of think pieces on the performance’s significance and the lyrical complexity of the rapper’s music. As this deep dive continued, I found myself wondering what his appreciation said about the state of hip-hop: was my dad’s Kendrick-curiosity evidence of the genre’s continued expansion, or a harbinger of impending obsolescence?

Flash forward to today, when hip-hop is allegedly in decline and media outlets are quick to eulogize the art form. CNN recently asked, “Are We Living Through a Rap Drought?”, while Rolling Stone warned, “Hip-Hop Has Slid on the Charts. YouTube’s Exit [From Billboard Tracking] Will Only Make it Worse,” and Complex contradicted these claims by arguing, “Rap Music Was Declining, But It’s Back.” In short, my dad killed hip-hop. Not actually (love you, dad!)—though the growing narrative surrounding the genre’s commercial decline has caught my attention. Is hip-hop receding from the mainstream? And if so, why?

So today, we’ll explore hip-hop’s meteoric rise and supposed fall, the genres gaining traction in recent years, and the forces that shape music popularity.

Is Hip-Hop in Decline?

Nothing is sacred in popular music. What feels ubiquitous today can quickly become obsolete. Consider four defining genres of 20th-century pop culture: rock, hip-hop, pop, and soul.

Each one of these formats has ridden its own wave of adoption and irrelevance. Rock hit a staggering peak in the mid-1980s before falling off. Soul saw its heyday in the 1960s before evolving into modern R&B and hip-hop. Pop came into its own with drum machines and digital production in the early 1980s. And hip-hop captured the countercultural energy rock left behind in the early 1990s.

Hip-hop eventually solidified itself as the defining sound of the digital age—at least thus far. Among the 20 artists with the most Billboard-charting hits (all-time), seven are hip-hop acts—a remarkable feat for a genre that first entered the mainstream in the mid-to-late 1990s.

When we look at the ages of these category-defining artists, most are still relatively early in their careers, making Kanye West something of an elder statesman at 48 years old:

• Kanye West: 48

• Drake: 39

• YoungBoy Never Broke Again: 26

• Rod Wave: 27

• Future: 42

• J. Cole: 41

• Lil Uzi Vert: 30

And yet, rumors of a hip-hop recession are indeed true. Over the past two years, the genre’s share of Billboard and Spotify hits has slipped, and in October of 2025, Billboard reported a week with zero hip-hop songs in the Top 40—the first such absence in more than 35 years.

So, what’s filled the space hip-hop once dominated? A blend of new arrivals and familiar mainstays. Latin music—led by Bad Bunny—and Asian pop, powered by K-pop acts like BTS, have expanded their global footprint. At the same time, legacy formats are resurging: country is booming, driven in large part by Morgan Wallen, while the loosely defined “alternative” category continues to gain share across the charts.

It is at this point that we’ll probe one of the universe’s greatest mysteries: What is alternative music? When I think about the creation of the “alternative” label, I like to imagine a high-stakes hostage situation that went something like this:

• Captor: “Come up with a new genre that is both rock but not classic rock that can’t use the word rock!”

• Hostage: “What? No!”

• Captor: “Do it!”

• Hostage: “No, I can’t—it’s too difficult!”

• Captor: “Do it, or things will get bad!”

• Hostage: “Fine! Fine! Alternative.”

• Captor: “Alternative to what?”

• Hostage: “Nothing. Just alternative.”

• Captor: “Ah, yes, perfect! That’s the type of vague semantical nonsense that will be displeasing to all.” [Captor lets out an evil laugh]

• END SCENE

Joking aside, this deliberately vague category has carved out a real presence on both the Billboard and Spotify charts. To better understand the shape of “alternative” today, we can look at the songs dominating Spotify’s Top 100 over the last 90 days—a mix of newer artists like Djo and Sombr alongside nostalgic mainstays like The Killers and Goo Goo Dolls.

And here is where things get kinda weird: in a flattened digital landscape like streaming, an artist competes with both new and old songs alike.

Over the past five years, an increasing share of Spotify’s Top 100 has gone to older tracks like Radiohead’s “Creep” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.”

Once a year, Spotify sees an abrupt uptick in trending Christmas classics during the holiday months, followed by an ever-increasing share of older tracks from canonical acts like The Killers and Radiohead.

So how do we reconcile this constellation of datapoints into a single, cohesive narrative about hip-hop’s current dip? In my view, we can’t.

All told, the genre’s shifting popularity is best understood through four broad hypotheses:

1. Streaming adoption laggards: Hip-hop uniquely benefited from early streaming adopters in the 2010s. Younger listeners—who were predisposed to the genre—were among the first to embrace platforms like Spotify, giving hip-hop an outsized digital footprint. More recently, late adopters—like country fans, older cohorts, and global audiences—have rebalanced the charts, lifting genres like country and K-pop.

2. Other styles offering greater novelty: Latin music and K-pop have introduced fresh sounds to the mainstream, while country is enjoying a resurgence, driven by artists like Shaboozey and Morgan Wallen, who infuse hip-hop beats into traditional country tracks.

3. Commercial oversaturation: Rock’s spectacular decline is often used as a template for analyzing the ascension and obsolescence of other genres. In rock’s case, the format became commercially oversaturated—through glam metal and stadium rock—and gradually lost its countercultural edge. Soon after, youth culture abandoned the genre entirely. Some observers see a similar pattern emerging in hip-hop, where ubiquity may be diluting its appeal.

4. Hip-hop was never meant to be mainstream: Personally speaking, I’m not a fan of this theory. The argument reads like a post hoc justification rather than a causal force. At an individual level, most artists are incentivized to get streams and sell out concerts because that’s what’s in their best interest. A coordinated pullback from the mainstream seems unlikely, even if some fragmentation benefits the genre’s long-term evolution.

There is also a distinct possibility that this entire episode is simply a blip. A major artist like Drake could return with a big release in the coming months—reinvigorating the genre’s cultural footprint—and this period will be canonized as a brief, highly unusual lull.

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Final Thoughts: Failure to Innovate

My writing process usually starts with a cultural hypothesis, followed by analysis to determine whether the topic merits an article. Around 75% of the time, it does—and I ultimately write the essay (hooray!). The other 25%? I essentially assign myself a homework problem that I cannot solve, which is a humbling outcome for a 32-year-old (sad!).

This essay was one of the rare cases where I stumbled onto a topic by accident. As such, my immediate reaction was disbelief. I’m not a hip-hop fan; if anything, the music I gravitate toward is at least two cultural cycles removed from whatever defines modern hip-hop.

Unsure whether my findings were legitimate, I did what any good statistician would: I asked a roomful of random dudes. Several of my brother-in-law’s friends self-identify as hip-hop fans, so I posed two questions to this group: (1) Is the genre actually in decline, and (2) if so, why?

The consensus was surprisingly consistent. My gaggle of guys agreed the genre was past its peak, and pointed to the same signal of decline: a lack of new, exciting artists. Does this insight qualify as anec-data? Absolutely. But it gestures toward something broader: the sense that hip-hop’s current moment is one of stagnant cultural innovation (allegedly).

Step back, and the genre’s shifting popularity follows a familiar arc seen across domains, from BlackBerry phones to TV sitcoms to rock music, in which a cultural form rises through innovation and subversion, scales on the strength of its novelty, and is eventually undermined by the very forces that fueled its ascent, such as:

• Changes in distribution that reshape consumption and competition: Streaming is no longer novel. As adoption has saturated, late-adopting audiences and their tastes are now fully reflected in major playlists and Top 100 charts. The result is a more crowded landscape, with hip-hop competing not just across genres, but across eras, as older songs resurface alongside new releases.

• Cultural drift: Once controversial enough to be banned from record stores, hip-hop now headlines the Super Bowl, an event watched by ~75% of Americans. The art form is no longer anti-establishment or exclusive to youth culture.

• Lack of (intra-genre) innovation: Genres sustain themselves by evolving, either through new subgenres or breakout artists who redefine the sound. When that pipeline slows, so does cultural momentum.

Hip-hop is far from extinct, but it does require some degree of reinvention to avoid the same fate as rock. Its next phase hinges on artists who will take the genre somewhere new—ideally in a direction my dad won’t understand.

Want more data like this?

Become a paying subscriber for interactive dashboards, free datasets, and to support independent data journalism.

Paying subscribers get:

• The Stat Significant Dataset Hub (Updated Weekly): a collection of free datasets across movies, music, TV, cultural trends, and economics.

• Interactive Data Hubs:

  • The Streaming Report: what people are watching on streaming.

  • The Spotify & TikTok Music Trend Report: the songs, artists, genres, and styles dominating Spotify and TikTok. And the older hits that refuse to fade.

  • Pop Music History: a deep dive into music history, Billboard chart performance, genre trends, and song composition.

Get access with:

• A $6/month Substack subscription

• A $72/year Substack subscription

Upgrade to Paid

*Note: For best results, open this link in a web browser while logged in to your Substack account.

Want to promote your data tool or media publication to Stat Significant’s 24,800 readers? Email daniel@statsignificant.com

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Introducing Stat Significant’s Interactive Culture Dashboards

Over the past few months, I’ve been building something new for Stat Significant: a suite of interactive data hubs designed to track culture in real time.

Paying subscribers now get access to a growing suite of continuously updated, interactive data pages—packed with charts and graphics—starting with:

• The Streaming Report: tracking what people are actually watching on TV streaming platforms.

• The Spotify Trend Report: a real-time view of the songs and artists dominating streaming, alongside older hits that refuse to fade.

• A History of Popular Music: a deep dive into music history, Billboard chart performance, genre trends, one-hit wonders, and song composition.

Each page features interactive visuals that update daily or weekly, with underlying datasets often available for download. And this is just the beginning—I’m planning to delve into other subjects (YouTube, TikTok music data, movies, actors, etc.), and expand this group of pages in the coming weeks.

Explore The Streaming Report

Today’s essay on TV quality uses data from The Streaming Report. Enjoy!

Intro: Is Ginny & Georgia a Real Show?

Everyone has a favorite conspiracy theory—an irrational belief they cling to, while knowing it’s (probably) false. Some people question the moon landing. Others insist Nelson Mandela died while in prison. While many “remember” the Monopoly Man having a monocle (even though he doesn’t).

As for me, I believe that Netflix’s mega-hit show Ginny & Georgia doesn’t actually exist. As far as I’m concerned, if you “believe” in Ginny & Georgia, you’ve fallen victim to an elaborate psy-op with no clear objective.

Several times a year, Netflix releases fresh Ginny & Georgia propaganda in an attempt to convince the masses that this series is (a) real and (b) widely watched. A few notable examples include:

• Season one of Ginny & Georgia reached an estimated 52 million viewers in its first 28 days.

• Season two of Ginny & Georgia racked up ~665 million viewing hours in the first half of 2023, making it Netflix’s second most-watched show during this time.

• Apparently, Ginny & Georgia boasted Netflix’s highest season completion rate among viewers who started the show in 2023.

These statistics paint a portrait of a show beloved by tens of millions, yet in today’s streaming landscape, popularity doesn’t always translate into cultural relevance. Saturday Night Live took aim at this disconnect in a 2023 sketch called “Hollywood Quiz Show,” a fictional game show that asks everyday contestants to identify modern entertainment. Throughout the sketch, the host hints at contemporary streaming hits, and the contestants fail to name a single one, including a pointed jab at the relative anonymity of Ginny & Georgia:

In a streaming abyss of endless content, shared cultural recognition is increasingly elusive—even for Netflix’s biggest shows.

The perceived obscurity of a streamer’s “hits” has reinforced a common belief that the shows succeeding on streaming are low-quality—widely consumed and rarely acclaimed. The logic underlying this belief is simple: if you’ve never heard of Ginny & Georgia, it must be bad, and the people watching it have bad taste, while you, a discerning viewer, only consume high-quality content.

As more unheralded series populate Netflix’s Top 10, I, like many others, have started to question the relationship between program quality and popularity. Do critical acclaim and storytelling prowess actually matter on streaming? Or is Netflix’s vaunted Top 10 the product of pure randomness?

So today, we’ll investigate the relationship between artistic merit and television viewership, examining which series attract audiences on Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, and beyond.

Does TV Show Quality Matter on Streaming?

For this analysis, we’ll draw on several views from Stat Significant’s Streaming Report—a new subscriber-only page that tracks the streaming landscape through automated dashboards. In these graphics, series quality is gauged via TMDB user ratings, while streaming popularity is measured using three years of Nielsen weekly Top 10 data.

To illustrate how this scoring works, we’ll examine a small sample of series from our dataset that spent multiple weeks in Nielsen’s Top 10, along with their assigned quality tiers. This list is topped by a handful of “elite” programs that earned critical acclaim and were consistent fixtures on the weekly charts, such as Landman, The Pitt, and Fallout.

When we group our full dataset of shows by quality and calculate the share of titles that reached Nielsen’s Weekly Top 10, a clear pattern emerges: “good” series appear most often, while “excellent” and “elite” programs show up less frequently.

Yikes! If you’re the type of cynic who loves declaring that we live in a “dead culture” without fully understanding what the term means, then you can stop here. Congratulations, you’ve got your sound bite.

Yet reaching the Nielsen charts is only half the battle. When we consider program viewership, a show’s audience is typically the product of two interrelated phenomena:

1. Reach: How many people are predisposed to watch the series? This may stem from the title’s presence on Netflix or a story’s roots in beloved intellectual property with a preexisting fanbase.

2. Longevity (often referred to as “legs”): Whether viewers stick with a show through all its episodes—and whether that program gains momentum through word of mouth.

In my opinion, making Nielsen’s Top 10 suggests meaningful reach. A show can be widely sampled—perhaps it’s trending on Hulu or HBO Max for a few days—but that doesn’t indicate longevity. So what does?

To ascertain cultural staying power, we’ll examine how long a program remains in Nielsen’s Top 10 and the total viewership hours reported by Nielsen while it’s on the charts.

When we repeat our quality bucketing exercise, we find that well-reviewed programs—like The Pitt, Fallout, Stranger Things, Squid Game, and Landman—remain on the charts significantly longer than lower-rated titles.

But wait, there’s more: shows that garner online acclaim generate significantly more viewing hours—nearly four times as much—when they appear on the Nielsen charts.

In short: Hooray, quality matters. Maybe our culture isn’t so “dead” after all! 🙌 And notably, this pattern holds even when isolating the data to Netflix titles—meaning quality matters on Netflix, too.

The next question is how we reconcile our findings: do these incentives push us toward mediocre programming that will make the charts, or to prestige content that may possess stronger word-of-mouth? Ultimately, the tradeoff boils down to an oversimplified equation that goes something like: [Expected Program Value] = [Reach] x [Longevity]

For those doing the math, this calculus favors the elite TV show. The entertainment industry has been, and always will be, heavily reliant on outliers—like a summer blockbuster or Oscar winner—and TV shows are no exception. A well-reviewed program like Adolescence is not predisposed to significant reach—compared to a superhero series or a video game adaptation—but if this show can break through and garner exceptional word-of-mouth, then it will stay on the charts for many weeks.

So how should our findings impact show development? If you’re a studio executive and you’re programming the perfect Q4 slate 🙌, what should you do?

To understand how streamers balance quality versus quantity, we’ll evaluate TV catalog strength by platform using one of our new Streaming Report views. The graph below displays a 2x2 comparison of library breadth (measured by number of programs available, for shows with a minimum number of TMDB reviews) vs. the percentage of these titles that are “acclaimed.”

According to this view, Netflix offers the largest TV catalog, HBO Max boasts the highest “hit rate” for high-quality programming (because it’s not TV—it’s HBO!), and Netflix ultimately delivers the greatest absolute number of high-quality series due to its scale.

So is the answer to the question of “which programming” just “as many shows as humanly possible”? Kind of.

What I can’t display here—and what is perhaps most crucial to content development—is capital investment.

When I worked at DoorDash, we roughly segmented restaurants into (1) highly valuable outliers and (2) merchants of average popularity. If you’re thinking purely in terms of a single cuisine, this might mean assigning your best salespeople to a single buzzy Greek restaurant that is disproportionately popular in San Francisco, and your second-tier sales reps to the 20 less-heralded Greek places. You need breadth—to give people as many Greek options as possible—while also getting the one special restaurant that you can build marketing campaigns around.

The same logic applies to streaming. Spend more money on prestige fare—like the final season of Stranger Things—and less money on run-of-the-mill content that will fill out your catalog—such as true crime, reality dating shows, and Is It Cake?.

Final Thoughts: Consecrating Mediocrity

Coverage of the entertainment industry has always skewed hypercritical. For frame of reference, consider this collection of pundit pull quotes in the run-up to a particularly contentious Oscar year:

• Pauline Kael (The New Yorker): “The Academy Awards are a consecration of mediocrity.”

• Vincent Camby (The New York Times): “The nominations…suggest not so much a vintage year as a confused one.”

• Judith Crist (ABC News): “Another year, another batch of questionable choices.”

Sounds like a ceremony celebrating a grab bag of big-time stinkers, right? Wrong! So very wrong.

In fact, the 1975 Oscars saw Best Picture nominations go to The Godfather Part II, Chinatown, and The Conversation, among others. Today, these films are widely regarded as all-time classics—cornerstones of the much-mythologized New Hollywood canon, alongside Taxi Driver, American Graffiti, Apocalypse Now, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

In retrospect, the mid-1970s are remembered not as a period of decline, but as a creative high-water mark—an era when commercial filmmaking and artistic ambition aligned.

The critics of 1975 didn’t realize how good they had it—a classic case of rosy retrospection (or “golden age thinking”), the tendency to view the present as broken while idealizing the past. This bias is evergreen. We fixate on what’s mediocre or disappointing, overlooking the broader foundation that makes those critiques possible in the first place.

Throughout this analysis, I was struck by two findings:

• First, the sheer volume of well-regarded television released in just the past two years is remarkable.

• Second, the industry’s economic incentives are meaningfully aligned with artistic ambition (prestige still pays). Put differently, we don’t realize how good we have it.

If you could drop a television viewer from 1975 into today’s landscape—handing them The Pitt, Squid Game, and Stranger Things—they’d be stunned by the TV content we receive for $9.99 a month (without ads!).

There will always be middling television shows—just as there have always been middling movies, plays, and songs—but we’re far from living in a “dead” culture that consecrates mediocrity. Even if Ginny & Georgia does exist—and is both bad and widely watched—there are just as many counterexamples that showcase television at its best.

Want more data like this?

Become a paying subscriber for interactive dashboards, free datasets, and to support independent data journalism.

Paying subscribers get:

• The Stat Significant Dataset Hub (Updated Weekly): a collection of free datasets across movies, music, TV, cultural trends, and economics.

• Interactive Data Hubs:

  • The Streaming Report: what people are watching on streaming.

  • The Spotify Trend Report: the songs and artists dominating Spotify.

  • Pop Music History: a deep dive into music history, Billboard chart performance, genre trends, and song composition.

Get access with:

• A $6/month Substack subscription

• A $72/year Substack subscription

  Upgrade to Paid

*Note: For best results, open this link in a web browser while logged in to your Substack account.

Want to promote your data tool or media publication to Stat Significant’s 24,800 readers? Email daniel@statsignificant.com

Need help with a data problem? Book a free data consultation

Connect with me on LinkedIn if you want to chat about a data project.

Like movies? Follow me on Letterboxd

Stat Significant’s Spotify & TikTok Music Trend Report 🎧

This page tracks what’s trending on Spotify and TikTok—highlighting the songs and artists driving the most listening today, as well as older acts and tracks that continue to thrive on those channels. The interactive charts and tables below explore chart performance, artist momentum, genre trends, and song composition, offering a real-time view of how popular music is evolving.

All visuals are updated regularly, with new data added daily and weekly. When available, click “Get Data” at the bottom of a chart to download the underlying dataset.

Because many of the graphics below are interactive, this page is best viewed on the web rather than in an email client or the Substack app.

Table of Contents

For paid subscribers — click a link below to jump straight to that section:

1. Section 1: The Top Artists and Songs on Spotify in the Last 90 Days:

   1. Top Artists on Spotify in the Last 7 Days

   2. Top Songs on Spotify in the Last 7 Days

   3. Top Artists on Spotify in the Last 90 Days

   4. Top Songs on Spotify in the Last 90 Days

2. Section 2: The Older Artists and Songs That Thrive on Spotify:

   1. Which Older Artists Still Thrive on Streaming?

   2. Which Older Songs Still Thrive on Streaming?

3. Section 3: What Music is Trending on TikTok?

   1. Which Songs Have Trended on TikTok in the Last 90, 30, and 7 Days?

   2. Which Artists Have Been Trending on TikTok in the Last 90, 30, and 7 Days?

   3. Which Popular Music Genres Trend on TikTok?

   4. How Much Overlap is There Between Songs Trending on TikTok and Spotify?

4. Section 4: How Song Genre, Composition, and Lyrical Themes Have Evolved on Spotify

   1. How Popular Music Genres Have Evolved On Streaming

   2. How Has Popular Music Composition Change Over Time?

   3. Song Composition by Musician: Which Artists Have the Most Positive Songs, Make the Most Dance-able Music, and More

   4. How Has Song Subject Matter Changed Over Time?

Section 1: The Top Artists and Songs on Spotify in the Last 7 Days & 90 Days

Top Artists on Spotify in the Last 7 Days

• What This Chart Shows: The top artists on Spotify in the last 7 days, determined by the most song entries on the Spotify Top 50 chart (each song + charting day combination counts as an “entry”).

• Data Source: Spotify Chart data provided by Soundcharts

• Data Update Frequency: Daily || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

Top Songs on Spotify in the Last 7 Days

• What This Chart Shows: The top songs on Spotify in the last 7 days, determined by number of days in the Spotify Top 50 chart.

• Data Source: Spotify Chart data provided by Soundcharts

• Data Update Frequency: Daily || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

Top Artists on Spotify in the Last 90 Days

• What This Chart Shows: The top artists on Spotify in the last 90 days, determined by the most song entries on the Spotify Top 50 chart (each song + charting day combination counts as an “entry”).

• Data Source: Spotify Chart data provided by Soundcharts

• Data Update Frequency: Daily || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

Top Songs on Spotify in the Last 90 Days

• What This Chart Shows: The top songs on Spotify in the last 90 days, determined by number of days in the Spotify Top 50 chart.

• Data Source: Spotify Chart data provided by Soundcharts

• Data Update Frequency: Daily || Data Can Be Downloaded: ✅

The Deep Dive: For Paying Subscribers

We also reserve several charts for paying subscribers, including:

• Which older artists still thrive on streaming?

• Which older songs still thrive on streaming?

• Which songs and artists are trending on TikTok?

• How much overlap is there between songs trending on TikTok and Spotify?

• How genre popularity has evolved on Spotify.

• How song composition has changed over time.

• Which artists make the most danceable, energetic, or positive music—and more.

• How lyrical themes in popular music have shifted over time.

These views update daily or weekly, are fully interactive, and include downloadable data.

Read more