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Parrot’s data can show which services are most effectively catering to YA audiences. There’s not one widely agreed-on definition of the YA genre, so we defined YA shows as those that have an overwhelmingly large share of their audience younger than 23 years old, while excluding some genres like children’s shows and anime. 

In 2022, HBO Max had the top three YA shows: “Euphoria,” with 29 times more demand than the average show in the U.S. market, followed by “Our Flag Means Death” and legacy title “Friends.”

Netflix teen drama “Riverdale” was that service’s most in-demand YA show. And we included another Netflix production, “Squid Game,” in our analysis, due to its largely Gen Z audience.

You’d think Disney+ would dominate the category, but it only had two shows in the top 10. Overall, though, it relies more on YA shows than its competition, with more than 10% of Disney+’s catalog demand in the last quarter of 2022 coming from these shows.

HBO Max is at once successful and efficient in drawing young adult audiences, with its heavy presence in the top 10. HBO Max and Hulu are the only major subscription services where YA has a higher demand than supply share. This means that those services draw an outsized proportion of attention from younger audiences with fewer shows. By comparison, Netflix has 12.2% of its catalog in the YA category, but those shows account for only 7.9% of its catalog demand.

Looking more broadly, we can see that there’s still opportunity in the YA category. Demand for these shows grew 47% from 2020 to 2022, while supply grew only 29%. That speaks to the need for streaming services to fill out the younger end of their quadrants — and make sure the shows they offer to this audience really pull them in.

Daniel Quinaud is a senior data analyst at Parrot Analytics, a WrapPRO partner. For more from Parrot Analytics, visit the Data and Analysis Hub.

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