Despite the significant buzz surrounding Ted Lasso, the Season 2 debut of Apple TV Plus' most popular show is driving only a limited amount of audience share to the subscription platform.
According to data compiled by Reelgood, Ted Lasso commanded 5.3% of the search and recommendation platform's referral traffic for the weekend of July 30-Aug. 1.
Apple TV Plus debuted the second episode of the second season of Ted Lasso on July 30. The show, which recently received a whopping 20 Emmy nominations, debuted its Season 2 on Thursday, July 22. For the weekend of July 23-25, it commanded just 4.6% of streams.
For context, when Disney Plus debuted Marvel "MCU"-based series Loki back on June 11, the show commanded 10.5% of Reelgood referral traffic.
The audience for the show and the platform appear to be growing. When Apple TV Plus debuted the first three episodes of Ted Lasso Season 1 on Friday, Aug. 14, 2020, the series controlled just 1.9% of Reelgood weekend referral traffic.
And perhaps most notable, Ted Lasso was the most-streamed series last weekend, Reelgood also noted.
Last week, Reelgood rival JustWatch revealed that for the first six months of 2021, Apple TV Plus controlled just 3% of its total referral traffic, with Netflix (28%), Amazon Prime Video (20%) and Disney Plus (14%) leading the pack.
In the vacuum created by Apple's laconic approach to disclosing subscriber metrics about its 20-month-old SVOD service, we're left to infer anecdotal information to determine the platform's relative scale.
During Apple's Q2 earnings call last week, CEO Tim Cook revealed only that Apple had 700 million subscribers globally across its vast subscription service portfolio, which includes everything from Apple Arcade to cloud storage.
In May, UK research company Ampere Analysis suggested that Apple TV Plus had about 40 million subscribers, many of them on free promotion based on Apple hardware purchases.
