Understanding what audiences want — and just as importantly, don’t want — to watch, can and should help guide resource allocation in 2024 and beyond. Combined with other key considerations in the development and green light process such as talent relationships and cost, a strong grasp of viewer preferences here can best position a platform for sustained success.

This is arguably more important now, at a time when content budgets are stabilizing if not outright declining industry wide, than at any point since the streaming wars began in earnest.

Yet it isn’t just a matter of understanding where demand and viewership is most concentrated on the surface. 

Drama (38.1%), comedy (13.4%), animation (12.3%), reality (9.8%), children (8.9%) and action and adventure (6.2%) were the six most in-demand genres globally in 2023 based on demand share, according to Parrot Analytics. However, this isn’t necessarily the most illuminating insight as genre demand at a macro level stays relatively consistent. This ranking is more or less reflected in any number of performance metrics across the spectrum year in and year out. What is perhaps even more helpful is understanding which subgenres tend to pop with audiences so that programmers can dig down more granularly.

Crime dramas, Japanese animation, sitcoms, romantic dramas, school, dramedies, sci-fi dramas, fantasy dramas, thrillers and superhero series were the 10 most in-demand subgenres globally last year, per Parrot. Audiences tend to love genre entertainment, broad appeal big stakes action, compelling VFX and world-building, thought-provoking and conceptually driven series, as well as good old fashioned laughter. But library building cannot solely be reduced to just investing in the most popular programming lanes. Efficiency must be taken into account as well. 

Genre — such as sci fi, fantasy, and superhero — entertainment tends to be among the most expensive to produce. In this era of cost cutting, in which customer acquisition must be more strategically balanced with retention and engagement, does it make more sense to develop a single $100 million superhero series or spread that money across both a sitcom and a crime drama? Would a thriller and a dramedy pair better than a sci-fi drama and a fantasy drama? What approach helps improve the lifetime value of a customer? Diving deeper into affinity — or the audience journey that explores what a user may watch sequentially — can help answer these questions and build on this initial knowledge base. 

Overall, investing wisely in content is not merely as simple as looking at what the most popular genres are. It is simply the first step in a larger process of marrying demand with market realities.