Spend enough time tracking the watch data that Netflix publishes on a regular basis — up to and including the streaming giant’s newly released “What We Watched” engagement report, a massive data set covering more than 18,000 TV shows and movies — and you start to see one title show up over and over again. It’s CoComelon, an eight-season collection of animated nursery rhymes for kids that debuted on Netflix back in 2020 and which has consistently stayed not only in Netflix’s weekly global Top 10 reports but also Nielsen’s weekly streaming Top 10 chart.
The franchise began on YouTube and has gone on to spawn not just the main CoComelon show on Netflix, but also spinoff Netflix content like CoComelon Lane — a nine-episode Netflix original series that also happens to be the streamer’s #7 most-watched show in the world right now. What’s more, this franchise is regularly outperforming established Netflix hits. The 9.5 million raw hours of watch time that CoCoemlon Lane racked up from Dec. 4-10, for example, surpassed the 8.2 million hours that The Crown: Season 6 pulled in over that same period.
According to Netflix, CoCoMelon was also not only Nielsen’s third most streamed title of 2022, with 37.8 billion minutes viewed. “If it continues on its current trajectory,” the streamer explained, in tandem with the debut of CoComelon Lane in November, “CoComelon will nab the record for most consecutive weeks at the top of the streaming ratings, passing the current leader, Grey’s Anatomy, at 144 weeks.”
All of that’s impressive enough for a franchise that many Netflix subscribers probably haven’t heard of before. Here, though, is perhaps the most eye-popping statistic of all about the CoComelon franchise, from Moonbug Entertainment:
Let’s go back to that “What We Watched” engagement report mentioned above, which covers 99% of all Netflix content viewed between January and June of this year. This data set includes the number of hours viewed for every single title (including both original and licensed content) that was watched for more than 50,000 hours. And that report reveals that Netflix subscribers watched CoComelon’s eight seasons for a staggering 601.2 million hours over the first half of this year.
For context, that’s more time than people spent watching Stranger Things over the same period. And if you took CoComelon’s combined 601.2 million hours (again, from across its eight seasons) and put that aggregate figure up against the top Netflix shows in this report, you’d have the #4 show on Netflix for the first half of this year — ahead of Wednesday, the first season of which pulled in 507.7 million hours.
With this kind of performance, some additional figures related to the CoComelon franchise should also come as no surprise. Moonbug was bought in 2021 for $3 billion, by two executives with backing from the private equity firm Blackstone. Also, the CoComelon YouTube channel, with 168 million subscribers, is one of the most-subscribed in the world, just behind other top channels like MrBeast’s (with 218 million subscribers). Animated kids’ content, in other words, is serious business.
