Nielsen numbers reinforce interest in ‘Mrs. Maisel’

PASADENA, Calif. — “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” has received warm reviews and scored big at the Emmys and the Golden Globes.

As with most other streaming shows, however, no one knows how broadly popular the Amazon Prime original series is.

Now there is some semblance of an answer: fairly popular, at least by the standards of cable TV comedies. Also, most of its viewers live on the coasts.

The insights come courtesy of Nielsen, the 96-year-old company that has only recently started tracking streaming viewership. The numbers are the first from Nielsen for an Amazon series.

The second season of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” averaged 1.9 million viewers during its first seven days on the service, according to Nielsen. The first episode averaged 3.3 million viewers during that week.

Those numbers suggest that the show would perform well among the more popular comedies on cable television. The FX critical darling “Atlanta” averaged 1.5 million viewers over seven days for its most recent season; “The Last O.G.,” the TBS series starring Tracy Morgan, had 2 million. (Both series have many more viewers on average when digital viewing is factored in.)

Many cable dramas have much larger audiences.

Nielsen has spent the past few years trying to find a method to measure viewership for streaming services. The step is crucial for the research company, which is facing something of an existential threat as people increasingly abandon the bread-and-butter viewership habits that Nielsen has long tracked.

During the past 15 months, Nielsen has publicly released occasional viewership statistics for Netflix series. It also releases more extensive numbers to media companies that pay for the service.

Nielsen’s streaming numbers come with several caveats. The company measures only in the United States, and it uses audio-recognition software to discern whether a Nielsen household is watching a series. The service doesn’t track out-ofhome viewing that might be done on a laptop, a phone or an ipad.

Amazon said last year that it had more than 100 million global subscribers.

Netflix has rejected Nielsen’s numbers in the past. Amazon declined to comment for this article.

In a statement, Brian Fuhrer, Nielsen’s senior vice president of product leadership, said the company released streaming figures that “might be engaging and topical for a broader audience.”

But the disclosure has come at a time when Netflix is finally starting to disclose some statistics on its own. It declared two new shows, “You” and “Sex Education,” “huge hits,” saying each was on track to be sampled by 40 million households within four weeks of becoming available.

Several TV executives privately groused that those numbers were meaningless.

Many TV executives hold out hope that a reliable third-party tracking service will eventually become available.

Nielsen is trying to prove that it’s in the pole position.