Outlander season 4 overall ratings: The biggest takeaways
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Let’s start by discussing averages — overall, the fourth season of the series ended up drawing 1.04 million live viewers weekly. There are a couple of things worth noting about this before continuing.
1. Live viewers is mostly a description of the people watching Outlander via traditional television. Technically, it’s also just an average measurement charted by Nielsen, but that’s a little too complicated for this specific article. This viewer figure does not include those watching early via the app or On-Demand.
2. We’re only talking about viewers in the United States.
On paper, season 4 is down a good 30% versus the live ratings for season 3, and it would be easy to make some sweeping generalizations here, including that a lot less people are watching or that this is somehow an indictment on the show’s producers or its season 4 story. We don’t think that’s the case. For starters, more viewers actually watched season 4 as it went along, and its lowest ratings came about at the start of the season. With that in mind, the biggest takeaway that we have is that it took some casual viewers, the non-book reader crowd who don’t closely follow the show online, some time to figure out that the show was back on the air. Starz puts a lot of money into promoting Outlander, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that every single viewer actually sees said promotion. Judging from how the viewership improved throughout the season, leading to a season-best 1.45 million viewers for the finale, it looks as though traditional TV viewers really took to the final episodes of this season.
One other reason for the lower ratings on average is simply a changing TV landscape. There are more viewers now checking out television via some other means, including via apps and On-Demand. It’s significantly harder in order to convince people to watch television live than it was years ago, and Starz makes all of their Outlander episodes available early for people who do want to watch on the app. Unfortunately, they don’t make all of that viewership data available publicly, so we are left to guess.
So is Outlander actually less popular in season 4 than season 3? It may not be — globally, it may actually be more popular than ever. The important thing to note entering season 5, though, is to not be surprised if the ratings fall again. Because of the long hiatus, there’s a chance that more viewers may take some time to come back to the show, as we saw during season 4. Also, it’s likely that even more people will take to watching early via the app or On-Demand as television becomes more a-la carte.
In the end, the biggest takeaway from season 4 is this: Outlander is still immensely successful for Starz. So long as everyone involved wants to keep making it, it’s hard to imagine it going anywhere.
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What do you think about the Outlander season 4 ratings overall? Be sure to share right now in the comments. (Photo: Starz.)