Young Royals Season 3: Everything you need to know to make a renewal happen
With the release date of the second season of Young Royals coming right around the corner (November 1), social media spaces are already buzzing with the possibility of future seasons for their beloved show. Folks that have been monitoring the creation of queer content around the globe will be well aware that Netflix has been cancelling good, queer television on a whim lately. Some cancellations make sense, and some don’t. If fans want to make a renewal happen for a third season of Young Royals, arming oneself with the knowledge about how to make that happen is imperative at this point.
There’s no question that Young Royals is an outstanding show worthy of several more seasons, however ensuring this happens is nothing but a numbers game. Netflix has some pretty complex algorithms in place (which they don’t actually share a lot of information on about how they calculate) and some others that are relatively straight forward. But one thing is for sure: all the different methods of calculating a show’s success matter and therefore, they’re all important.
The good news here is, if viewers understand how this works, launching campaigns for renewals becomes a much easier task. In the upcoming how-to guide, we’re going to be discussing other shows that have been canceled or renewed. Our purpose for doing this is to solely demonstrate the realities of the situation – not to pass judgment on any of the shows or anyone involved in making them.
Here are some of the crucial things fans need to be aware of if they want to make a renewal happen for a third season of Young Royals.
Make a renewal happen? Finishing is paramount
This might seem like a no-brainer, but to make a renewal happen, it’s crucial for a show to be completed by an individual user. In an article discussing this very topic What’s On Netflix used the statistics around Heartstopper and First Kill – two other young adult shows with queer characters that were released lately – to demonstrate the importance of this very thing.
“For First Kill, the show had under 45% of people who started episode 1 to finish episode 8. That’s compared to a show like Heartstopper, which had a completion rate of around 75%,” says What’s On Netflix.
First Kill creator Felicia D. Henderson told The Daily Beast that the completion rate was a major contributing factor in the cancellation of the show.
“When I got the call to tell me they weren’t renewing the show because the completion rate wasn’t high enough, of course, I was very disappointed … what showrunner wouldn’t be? I’d been told a couple of weeks ago that they were hoping completion would get higher. I guess it didn’t.”
Just because a lot of folks start a show, doesn’t mean anything. For their viewership to be counted in the algorithm that rates a show’s success, it must be completed every time it is started. Anything less than a 50% completion rate guarantees cancellation.
It’s important to understand that when considering shows for renewal, the genre of a show bares no relevance on that decision. It doesn’t matter if the characters are queer, straight, male, or female. The decision will be solely made on the numbers: did the amount of people that watched, add value to Netflix as a company.
How you watch matters
The way people consume the show also seems to matter a great deal to Netflix. If you’re one of these people that likes to take your time with something and savor each episode, you might be hurting your fave show’s chance at renewal.
The amount of hours that folks are sitting and watching a show matters. If lots of viewers are sitting and committing to hours on end, the show is more likely to end up being considered a favorable one by Netflix standards.
This is why, if viewers want to see a third season of Young Royals, it is highly recommended that they sit and watch all six episodes at once, if possible. If this isn’t possible, group the time spent on the couch watching to as few chunks as possible, finish the show completely, and then start again. Stretching viewership out over an extended period of time does nothing good for chances of renewal.
Neil Gaiman tweeted about this recently when talking of The Sandman. Despite the show’s popularity and die-hard fandom, folks were not sitting and binge watching, preferring to savor episodes one at a time. This is detrimental and harmful to the future of a show that is still in Netflix’s hands.
For shows that don’t meet Netflix’s requirements for streaming, binge watching behaviors tend to drop off in week 2 and 3 after release. Shows that can maintain high levels of binging in those weeks have a much higher chance of securing a renewal. In fact, weeks 2 and 3 are considered crucial for renewal prospects.
There is a third – and very complex – algorithm that is also taken into account when deciding whether to renew or cancel shows. The actual way in which Netflix calculates those numbers though, has never been released to the public. If you want to learn more about that, read Bloomberg’s breakdown of why Dave Chapelle still has a home at Netflix, despite all the controversy and petitions to cancel him here.
At this point in time we have no information about the possibility of a Netflix renewal of Young Royals for a third season. The window for collecting statistical data is exactly 28 days after a show’s release. All we know is, we want to make a renewal happen for our beloved show and we know you do too!
When you engage with Young Royals on November 1 (which is a Tuesday fam, and not a Friday like most Netflix releases), we strongly urge you to keep these things in mind when making decisions about how and when you will watch.
Happy streaming, and let’s make that renewal happen!
Pingback: Young Royals S2X06: August The-Butt-Munch and other terrible things! - Q+ Magazine