Does Content Spend Translate into Viewership?

"Amazon MUST be pissed about the ROI on their content investment. No?"

That’s what Evan Shapīro asked yesterday, and it made me wonder: to what degree?

So I made this chart to dig into it.

By plotting global content spend vs. U.S. viewership share (from Nielsen’s May 2025 Gauge), we can actually see how each company is performing relative to their investment.

Amazon is well below the trendline.
They spend ~$7B annually on content and get just 3.6% of U.S. TV share. If viewership were proportional to spend, they’d expect something closer to 6%, a +66% lift from current levels. So yes, Evan was right. Amazon has to be questioning the return.

Meanwhile, look at YouTube:
They overperform by a wide margin. 12.5% viewership on $17.6B in content spend, driven primarily by payouts to creators and partners. That’s the most efficient ROI in the business.

Spending billions is easy. Turning that into attention is hard.