It is not even easy to understand what is meant by "viewers": every streaming platform, in fact, uses metrics different to calculate the number of users who view a content, thus making comparisons between the various realities particularly difficult, while it is always easy to obtain a data that is so to speak striking (Netflix, for example, had introduced a method that counted a title as viewed even if only two minutes of content had been viewed, while more recently to draw up its global and national Top 10 it went back to counting the total hours viewed for each title). A comparison that is spontaneous, but which precisely does not take into account the different measurements, is the one with House of The Dragon, which at the debut gathered an audience of almost 10 million spectators, increased by 2% with the second episode, combining both the visions linear on Hbo and streaming views.
There is no doubt that The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has been a rather resounding success in the past few days and will certainly continue to grow as the following episodes are released in the coming weeks, one a week. But if the official data rightly speak of a huge success, as usual online the reality seems completely different: the series, in fact, has been the subject of a violent review bombing, with many commentators who have begun to criticize above all the choice of include black and colored actors in the roles of dwarves, elves and pelopedes. If for the criticism of Rotten Tomatoes the series is rated positively at 84%, for the public it stops at 35%, an evaluation obviously distorted by these coordinated attacks. Prime Video has inserted a window of 72 hours before we can rate the series, so that we can distinguish which comments are from users who have actually seen the series and those that have come from trolls and bots.