Man, Squid Game is freaking huge
If Netflix’s internal viewership numbers are to be believed, roughly 87 million people have watched the entire run of Squid Game since the show’s worldwide release several weeks ago.
As pointed out by the quantitatively-minded folks at Morning Brew, a business newsletter, that’s more than the total number of subscribers to HBO Max or Hulu, and it’s greater than the number of subscribers to Apple TV+ and Paramount+ combined. It’s within spitting distance of the number of people who tuned into the Super Bowl in 2021.
There are, of course, reasons to be distrustful of Netflix’s numbers. The streamer is famously cagey about viewership metrics. It typically counts a show or movie as “watched” if a viewer puts it on for two minutes, which could lead to wildly inflated numbers for shows that people decide to abandon.
But that 87 million figure is a reportedly reliable internal number of people who’ve completed the entire series, not just two minutes of it, according to Bloomberg. And other data sources suggest interest in the show is just massive.
Squid Game is a South Korean show ostensibly about a lethal competition where desperate people play schoolyard games, like Red Light Green Light, in hopes of winning a payout of billions of won, the South Korean currency. Most of the main characters are deep in financial debt and obsessed with money, so there’s a lot of talk about won — how much characters have, how much they’re trying to get, how much they owe one mob boss or another.
The titular game’s total prize pool adds up to 45.6 billion won, which sent me Googling to see how much that adds up to in U.S. dollars. Apparently I was far from the only one, as there’s been a recent explosion in won-related Google searches. Searches for “won to dollars,” for instance, are up roughly 100-fold since the show launched.
Because Google only reports search data in relative terms — a scale from 0 to 100, where 100 represents the maximum number of searches in a given time period — it’s impossible to know the precise raw number of queries for any given term. But you can get a sense of absolute search volume by comparing one term against another that you know there’s a lot of interest in.
This time of year, for instance, Halloween searches are big enough that Google releases an annual ranking of the most searched-for Halloween costumes. So consider this: in the first week of October, searches for information about the won surpassed total interest in Halloween costumes.
To be clear, we’re talking about interest in a foreign currency that I’d wager most Squid Game watchers hadn’t even heard about before tuning into the show. Interest in the show itself is even more massive.
When using Google data to assess the total popularity of a given term I tend to think of three thresholds of interest. The first is Kim Kardashian — as a generic celebrity she makes a good benchmark for widespread popularity. The second is the current president — a great proxy for something being popular enough to make headlines. Cats represent the final frontier in search interest — almost universally adored and a huge part of our daily lives.
With that in mind, let’s plot Squid Game against those three thresholds.
As you can see, in early October the show surpassed all three. As someone who’s been playing with Google Trends for the better part of a decade I can tell you that this rarely happens — the last time I recall it, in fact, was the initial surge of interest in Covid-19 in 2020. Squid Game: bigger than cats!
Another way to put Squid Game’s popularity in context is to compare it to other TV shows that made a big splash recently. Let’s see how it stacks up against The Mandalorian, WandaVision, Loki and Bridgerton.
Squid Game, in other words, is generating roughly twice as much search interest as the huge Marvel/Disney franchise shows or Netflix’s previous record-smasher.
Again: Netflix’s own viewership numbers are inherently sketchy, and the company has plenty of incentive to overstate things. But Google’s data doesn’t lie: Squid Game is freaking enormous.