Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building was the best merchandised streaming title in September, according to Looper Insights’ “Streamer of the Month” ranker.
The comedy whodunit starring Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez, now in its fifth season, generated $6.854 million in “media placement value,” or “$MPV” as Looper expresses it. That performance surpassed Disney+’s Lilo & Stitch ($6.201 million in $MPV) and Amazon Prime Video’s The Summer I Turned Pretty ($4.166 million). The latter topped Looper’s ranker for titles in both July and August.
Amazon Prime Video, meanwhile, has consistently ranked as the top app in “Streamer of the Month,” and it once again led the ranker in September with a $MPV of $118.166 million.
Formerly monikered by Looper Insights as “Merchandiser of the Month,” Streamer of the Month uses a proprietary method cooked up by UK-based Looper to place a value on the product positioning or so-called real-estate apps and content titles receive across TVOS homepages, digital stores, pay TV user interfaces and other places consumers go to finding streaming video entertainment.

SVODs and FASTs are expanding globally and the number of gateway OS platforms is hardly consolidating, making the merchandising of digital wares for maximum visibility increasingly challenging.
Not surprisingly, effective merchandising seems to coincide with high levels of viewership. According to Nielsen, Only Murders in the Building generated 574,000 views in the U.S. during the week of Sept. 8-14, ranking it fourth among all titles. It was the No. 1 non-Netflix title. The other two non-Netflix titles in Nielsen’s top 10 that week were The Summer I Turned Pretty, and another Amazon title, The Terminal List (which also finished No. 5 on Looper Insights’ merchandising ranker).
Wrong Paris, Right Netflix
As a LightShed Partners research note from last week explained, the old paradigm for generating brand awareness for content has been flipped on its ear. Analyst Rich Greenfield cites Warner Bros.’ Superman as example. Traditionalists applauded last week when Warner Bros. Discovery revealed its summer blockbuster had generated 13 million views in just its first 10 days of streaming on HBO Max.
The $615 million garnered by the film at the global box office was actually disappointing, given Superman’s production cost exceeded $200 million, and its promotion and distribution costs probably did, too. However, the traditionalists, according Greenfield, certainly looked at the title’s successful SVOD debut and attributed at least some of it to the movie’s huge promotional spend. In order to get a movie or TV show seen, the conventional wisdom states, the distributor has to invest in advertising it.
That was before Netflix established perhaps the most powerful platform in the world for surfacing the right content to the users who are most likely to watch it.
As Greenfield noted, a week before Superman arrived on HBO Max, The Wrong Paris — a low-budget romantic comedy not released in theaters — generated 35 million views in its first 10 days on Netflix.
“What happened with The Wrong Paris is NOT an anomaly,” Greenfield wrote. The biggest streaming platform in the world, investing heavily for years in improving its user search and recommendation, effectively merchandised The Wrong Paris, making sure the right subscribers at least were aware it was a viewing choice.
Greenfield told this yarn to make a larger point — he was shooting down the rumor that Netflix would buy Warner Bros. Discovery.
But his comparison of amply promoted Superman and an obscure direct-to-streaming romcom also makes a point about creating awareness for movies, shows and apps in the new entertainment economy. For distributors lacking a platform proliferated into more than 300 million homes globally like Netflix, and not armed with perhaps the most effective search-and-recommendation algorithms in the market, how and where they position their streaming wares matters.