Cobra Kai released its third season on January 1st. This is the first season to be released as a Netflix original. The show was first released in 2018 as a YouTube original and had two seasons on that platform before its move to Netflix on August 28th, 2020.
For the week of January 3 – 9, Cobra Kai was the most in-demand show in the US, knocking The Mandalorian out of the top spot. During this week it had 139.4 times the demand of the average series in the US.
Demand for Cobra Kai on its S3 premiere and seven days following was 130.1 times the average demand for a show in the US. This far exceeds its S1 and S2 premiere demand which were 45.8 and 29.1 times the average respectively. This shows that while demand had increased from S1 to S2 by 57%, the real explosion in demand occurred between Season 2 and Season 3 when demand rose by 191%.
It is difficult to say how much of Cobra Kai’s success this season is due to it being released on Netflix. But, we can look at how the show did when its first two seasons were made available on Netflix to get a sense of how much of a boost the platform gave the show without new episodes:
The spike in demand following Cobra Kai becoming available on Netflix was larger and sustained for longer than the demand spikes around either of the first two seasons. This is especially impressive given that no new episodes were released at the time. Therefore the increase in demand was likely due to new audiences discovering the show for the first time on the platform, a testament to the audience reach and marketing power of Netflix.
