Every quarter, the Top 20 rankings are more than a scoreboard for top performance. They are a map to showing what’s capturing attention, how platforms are evolving, and where culture is shifting next. At BENlabs, we curate the Top 20 rankings using Nielsen data, tracking peak monthly viewership across platforms.
The streaming wars didn’t pause in Q3. They just got smarter. After a softer Q2, total impressions across the major platforms’ Top 20 titles rebounded to 753 million, a clear sign that audiences are settling back into their couches as summer fades. More importantly, the gap between average-performing titles and true breakouts widened, creating an environment where the right content can deliver outsized reach. Q3 has one important message for brands: placement volume still matters, but placement precision matters more.
Netflix Ate The Streaming Market in Q3—and Everyone Else Felt It
Netflix reminded everyone why it remains the category king, claiming 41% of all Top 20 title impressions with 312 million views across their top 20 content. A total no rival touched. It’s no wonder why their $83 billion dollar deal to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery is likely to be scrutinized by regulators. Five Netflix titles exceeded 20 million impressions, led by the cultural juggernaut K-POP Demon Hunters. That’s what makes Netflix’s Q3 feel different: when one platform reliably produces high volume and high velocity titles all at once, it creates a “gravity zone” for attention. For brands, that’s precisely where integrations have the best chance to become culturally adjacent rather than just seen in passing, because the audience isn’t merely sampling content they are marinating in it.
Q3's Quiet truth: not every platform needs monster hits for value
The quarter’s “quiet truth” is that not every platform needs a K-Pop Demon Hunters to be a valuable brand partner. Consistency creates its own kind of power. A steady bench means audiences keep returning, titles keep charting, and integrations gain more time to be viewed.
Amazon and HBO Max proved that steady viewership could close the gap over time, posting healthy sequential growth driven by reliable mid-tier hits rather than one-week wonders. Amazon’s Top 20 titles delivered 108M impressions in Q3, continuing steady growth (+8.3% vs. Q2). Rather than hinging on a single runaway title, its strength came from dependable mid-to-upper-tier performers—exactly the kind of slate that creates repeatable outcomes. HBO Max generated 83 M impressions in Q3 (+9.1% vs. Q2 and +25% vs. Q1), with momentum driven by theatrical-to-streaming releases supported by a shelf of mid-tier hits.
Apple TV+ may not deliver massive spikes, but it remains one of the steadiest performers in the landscape. Weekly episode drops, a tight library of prestige originals, and long-tail viewing behavior keep audiences coming back even outside release windows. In a smaller catalog, titles can remain visible longer and placements can benefit from that consistency because they live inside shows people return to week after week.
This is the kind of environment where brand visibility can feel premium and persistent rather than fleeting. The content may not “explode,” but it endures and endurance is a different kind of scale. For brand campaigns that need predictable reach, the winners are increasingly the streamers that can deliver both breakout moments and consistent mid-tier performance.
Down and Out: When Tentpoles Pause, Platforms Feel Empty
At the other end, Paramount+, Peacock, and Disney+ all lost significant ground when their tentpole engines slowed. Paramount+ experienced the sharpest drop, falling nearly 59% since Q1. Without its franchise engines driving viewership, impressions collapsed, and only two Q3 titles cleared 5M impressions. Peacock struggled too: its top title reached 4.2M, with the rest clustering in the 2–4M range, signaling a lack of breakout originals. Disney+ continued its downward slide, ending Q3 at 69.1M impressions, down 32% from Q1, as catalog alone couldn’t replace the lift that fresh franchise releases provide.
The content consequence is that these slates create fewer “must-watch” moments. And without must-watch moments, integrations can drift into the background: present, but not as powerful. Q3 showed that attention scarcity punishes platforms that can’t reliably generate new content. Platforms with diverse, original-heavy pipelines are pulling away from the pack, while those leaning too heavily on franchises or library content risk sharp volatility when those franchises dry up.
Genre Momentum: Comedy Continues to be the Efficiency King
Drama still commands the most titles and total impressions in the Top 20’s space but Comedy delivered the quarter’s standout efficiency story, with 136 million impressions from just 16 titles. Action held steady as a dependable high-energy vehicle, while Animation continued to draw massive audiences. The alignment is instructive: the genres driving the strongest audience pull—Drama, Comedy, and Action—are the same ones that naturally lend themselves to authentic, story-driven brand moments. Emotional stakes, rewatch appeal, and adrenaline-fueled set pieces all create organic space for products to feel indispensable rather than inserted.
Nostalgia and Cultural Relevance: The Twin Engines of Breakouts in Q3
Two titles perfectly illustrated where streaming attention is flowing:
- Happy Gilmore 2 and its predecessor’s surge showed that nostalgia remains an unstoppable force. Familiar IP cuts through algorithmic noise with built-in awareness and emotional connection: the comfort food that audiences actively seek out. Happy Gilmore 2’s success also brought into the spotlight the re-watch appeal of older titles on streaming with the original film receiving 12M impressions in Q3. Audiences flocked to watch the sequel and paid homage to the original showing older nostalgic content can receive just as many views as a brand new original.
- K-POP Demon Hunters proved that culturally specific, music-driven storytelling can scale globally at lightning speed when executed with authenticity and polish. Soundtrack virality, TikTok momentum, and cross-promotional energy turned a single title into a franchise-launching event. K-POP Demon Hunters continues to prove that animation, while not the best for product integration, is a viewer favorite and a staple in a platforms content library.
For brands, both trends are gold: nostalgia offers instant recognition and positive halo, while culturally relevant hits provide the social amplification that transcend the media space. Q3 showed that when content becomes an event, everything inside it travels further.
The Power of Being in the Right Room: How Selecting the Right Titles are Key for Campaign Success
Across the 160 titles that made each platform’s Top 20 this quarter, one trend stood out sharply for BENlabs: titles with our client product integrations consistently outperformed those without. Even when integrated titles represented slightly less than half the Top 20’s across all platforms, they captured more than half of total impressions: 403 million versus 351 million. On a per-title basis, the lift was even more dramatic, with integrated titles averaging 5.23 million impressions each, a full 24% ahead of non-integrated titles. This confirms how BENlabs is consistently able to identify the titles that break through the algorithmic noise, sustain attention, and turn into true cultural real estate. That’s the “right room” in 2025, where a placement isn’t just seen, it sticks.
Smart integration partners are identifying high-potential projects earlier, negotiating deeper creative involvement, and landing brands in stories that resonate longer and deeper with viewers. By combining industry expertise with predictive metrics through Content IQ (which helps flag high-potential projects early) and performance measurement through our Cultural Relevance Index (which quantifies how integrations perform once content is live), BENlabs can select and secure deeper, more natural brand involvement in the stories that resonate longest and travel furthest. In a world where discovery is increasingly algorithmic and attention is the scarcest resource, being in the titles that rise to the top is the most efficient way to earn genuine audience exposure.
Looking Ahead to Q4 and Beyond
In this environment, the brands that win won’t be the ones with the biggest budgets, they’ll be the ones with the sharpest content instincts. Q3 showed that the hits are getting bigger, the mid-tier is getting stronger, and the titles that truly connect are rewarding strategic integration partners with efficiency gains we haven’t seen before. For marketers, the opportunity isn’t just to show up. It’s to show up in the stories audiences are choosing, sharing, and rewatching. The canvas has never been richer. The only question is which brands will paint on it.
This article was written by Rachel Econ, Content Curation Manager at BENlabs.
