South Park May Push Paramount+ Over 50 Million Subs

I had someone in the know tell me that the new South Park “event” (Post Covid Special) is driving quite a bit of new subscriptions to Paramount+. That has not been publicly announced yet, and I don’t have numbers, but I found it interesting nonetheless. Coinciding with other, unrelated sources telling me that Hawkeye is not the success Disney had hoped for on Disney+, it got me wondering…

So, I started doing some digging on a comparison. It appeared to me that the new South Park event was driving more people to Paramount+ since the start of December than Hawkeye was driving to Disney+. That’s not the same as viewership. On viewership, it would almost be impossible for South Park to beat Hawkeye in streaming ratings given South Park’s mature rating and Hawkeye’s more family-friendly material. It will be January anyway before we likely receive detailed readouts on how the two properties performed.

Nevertheless, Paramount+ has been struggling to pick up subscribers. That is, until three weeks ago, which just happens to coincide with the new South Park event starting to release. I didn’t put those things together until I heard that South Park is likely driving large numbers of new subscribers. But maybe all those people were just buying a subscription to watch Clifford, right? Well… that’s when I turned to Google Trends to see what’s going on, and sure enough, South Park is currently driving more internet interest than Hawkeye.

And look what I found. Since November 26th, South Park has been running very close to Hawkeye in internet searches, overtaking Hawkeye on December 3rd. How about that?… it matches with what a source was telling me. Now whey do I keep going back to Hawkeye, though, when I’m supposed to be talking about South Park and Paramount+? The answer is that we know Hawkeye’s opening two episodes came in at 60% of Loki’s premiere. And we know that Loki’s premiere was the top streaming show during its run, even if it didn’t boost subscription rates dramatically. That means, we can decipher about where South Park is running ratings-wise by using Hawkeye as a comparison.

Let’s do the math. If approximately 14 million user accounts tuned into Loki, then that means about 8.4 million tuned into Hawkeye. It has fallen significantly (allegedly) since then, so let’s say it’s getting 6 million account views per episode. If that’s the case, South Park is likely also getting between 5-7 million user account views over on Paramount+. Why does that matter? Because that would mean South Park is likely pulling more than 10% of user accounts into watching it. For a streaming service that has half of its audience watching children’s material, that would likely indicate serious growth is occurring in a new demographic.

Paramount+ was at 47 million subs when it gained one million in a single week as South Park launched its first big Paramount+ event. Will the raunchy show that has lasted more than a generation push the service over 50 million before the end of the year? My guess is yes.