Andor Audience

I am enjoying Andor so much. I knew I would. It’s fabulous. But that’s not the subject today.

You may have seen some articles about Andor’s viewership, like this one. This is classic clickbait baloney.

Andor’s numbers have not been released. I would not at all be surprised if the numbers are lower, even far lower, than The Mandalorian, Obi-Wan Kenobi, et al.—because the show is not for kids!

If something as smart and sophisticated as Andor is never attempted again, well, that would be heartbreaking. The show is massively expensive and a big swing by Lucasfilm and Disney to broaden Star Wars’ appeal for more of a “tastemaker” audience.

And if it doesn’t work out, they may very well say, nope, not gonna do that again—let’s make more shows for kids. (To be clear, I think there should always be Star Wars shows for kids. It would be a shame if they were exclusively for kids.)

The articles started with a tweet by a rep from a company called Parrot Analytics. It’s a severe looking graph with Andor’s numbers well below those of the other Star Wars shows.

But Parrot is not Nielsen ratings! They claim to measure a show’s popularity by its “engagement” with viewers across, well, everything: social media, web searches, blogs, etc.

It’s basically trying to sum up how popular something is by how much traffic there is about it online. And, again, of course Andor has lower metrics—because it’s not for kids!

Kids chatter about this stuff more than adults. Kids look for trailers, buy toys, and so on and so forth. They coo about Baby Yoda. Adults buy Mercedes, and go about their lives.

What the clickbait really seems to be is an ad for Parrot Analytics, who are trying to sell expensive subscriptions to industry insiders.

Maybe they have a great service. But it’s a shame that the clickbait sites just jump on any Star Wars “news” with so little thought and analysis. It’s just about eyeballs.

Sigh.