‘Outlander’ season 2, episode 9 ratings: Did season 3 renewal lead to improvement?

It was not too long ago when “Outlander” fans had some wonderful news worthy of celebration: The show was renewed for not just one, but two seasons! Thanks to that, doing these sort of ratings updates have become a little less meaningful, but we figured that we would go ahead and offer up another one today just from the vantage point of giving you some additional perspective on if the renewal helped or hurt the numbers.

Unfortunately, we’d say that it was more of the latter in terms of the live+same day measure. While the Starz series continued to post a 0.2 rating in the 18-49 demographic, for the first time this season the show dropped below a million viewers. In total, around 940,000 viewers had a chance to check out “Je Suis Prest” live. This marks the show’s lowest live viewer total since April 2015.

Do we think that the renewal convinced some viewers that they didn’t need to watch the show live this past weekend? Probably, and we do understand that because it is the weekend. Granted, there’s never really been a reason to watch live anyway, since Starz doesn’t rely on advertisements and the majority of “Outlander” viewers don’t watch it on TV the moment that it airs. Around five million multiplatform viewers watched the first season a week; some of these people may have been watching multiple times, but this still shows exactly what the power is of this audience. (Updated: As pointed out by Rosemary on Twitter, episode 9 was available to many early, which may have impacted the “Je Suis Prest” performance.)

For those wondering, we may not know the full scope of the “Outlander” season 2 viewership until after the season airs.

Interested in getting some other “Outlander” news? Then head over here, where you can get a full preview for this weekend’s new episode! Also, sign up over at this link to secure some more TV news on all we cover via our official CarterMatt Newsletter. (Photo: Starz.)