The range of Outlander season 3 and its internet popularity (so far)

If you are reading the article, then you are probably a rather large Outlander fan and are thoroughly excited to see more of the show on Starz. How many people are right there with you? The idea for this article is to look at the scope of the popularity of the show right now in terms of social traffic, which is one of the driving forces of the series. There are some forms of publicity that really cannot be quite some quantitative, but in this age of the internet, there are many things that we can in fact gauge. This should help us further understand where the mainstream enthusiasm is for the upcoming season 3 premiere.

What we’re doing in this article is rallying up viewership totals of some of the videos recently released, whether it be the official season 3 trailer, the show Comic-Con panel, or the recent “Parallel Lives” featurette that was recently released. There are other videos that are out there from the past month that can be gauged through various outlets, but we want to keep things reasonably simple and easy to understand.

Note that all viewership totals within this article are as of July 31 at around 8:45 a.m. Pacific time. They will obviously change depending on when you are reading this.

YouTube – Per the official Starz channel, the official season 3 trailer has over 458,500 views. Meanwhile, the featurette has been watching more than 45,100 times and the Comic-Con panel has 128,800 views. These three videos, just via Starz alone, are showing more than 632,000 views. Not bad given that all of these clips are still less than two weeks old.

As for elsewhere on YouTube (remember that some of these videos are posted on other channels), the TV Guide version of the trailer has 114,000 views, and we’ve calculated just over 15,000 views there elsewhere. Meanwhile, over 330,000 views are counted for the Comic-Con panel outside of the official Starz channel, which makes sense given that some other places had it online well before the network did.

The viewership for the “Parallel Lives” featurette is minuscule on YouTube outside of Starz, as many videos from outside channels with the clip were taken down after the fact. Overall, you’ve got over 962,000 views for Outlander-related media across the YouTube channels that we’ve found; given a margin of error (there are likely many videos with smaller numbers we haven’t seen), we’d be willing to estimate the total number of views for the trailer, the panel, and the “Parallel Lives” featurette at around a million. It may be higher with international totals.

Facebook – Views on Facebook have become far more substantial in recent years than even YouTube, largely because people are already on there. The trailer for season 3 in this media has been seen a whopping 6.4 million times, largely in part because Starz has it pinned to the Outlander Facebook page. The featurette, meanwhile, has been seen more than 844,000 times. (For the Comic-Con panel, the network has merely linked over to YouTube.)

Combining these two videos, you’re looking at 7.24 million views. Add that to our previous approximation, and you’ve got around a total viewership audience across both platforms of 8.24 million.

Are there more numbers out there?

Absolutely, but some of them are challenging to track. For example, Twitter doesn’t share view counts, and Starz has offered up the trailer and the featurette there. There are also international outlets for the show, but we’re (as stated) focused more here on Starz. Videos featuring the cast speaking to various outlets at Comic-Con have all been viewed tens of thousands of times each, and Starz also initially released the featurette and the trailer through their own embed, which doesn’t offer much tracking information and wasn’t counted in any other to date.

When you consider all of the different variations of videos that are out there, our final estimate in this article is that all forms of Outlander-related media for season 3 have, just in the past two weeks, topped out well over ten million views. There is a substantial margin of error in there since we’re estimating some numbers (Twitter is the biggest mystery), but this seems to make sense when you consider all platforms.

Want some more Outlander news?

You can get all sorts of assorted highlights from the recent TCA Summer Press Tour and more by heading over to the link here. (Photo: Starz.)