Passport: The January Juggernaut

When January’s Passport viewing numbers for our Member Services Bureau (MSB) partner stations came out, our data scientists did a double-take. They checked the numbers, talked among themselves and even reached out to other colleagues in the system to see if they saw similar performance at their station.

They did.

We knew January was going to be a big month for Passport thanks to All Creatures Great and Small, Around the World in 80 Days and Vienna Blood, but it turns out the streaming numbers weren’t just big, they were huge. With over 2.3 million viewing sessions, the previous record wasn’t broken, it was smashed.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. If that’s true, this 24-month view of the streaming behavior of donors at the 35 MSB stations we track speaks volumes about the direction things are headed and the growing importance of Passport for public television stations:

If we pull back the lens and look at all stations in the CDP Analytics Engine, the story is the same, record -breaking streaming numbers across the system. And it turns out January wasn’t just a great month for heavy users of Passport, it also re-engaged casual streamers who don’t stream every month, including those who hadn’t streamed for 3 months or more:

And then there were the donors.

For the 35 MSB stations we tracked, roughly 8,500 donors joined to get Passport access in the month of January:

Those 8,500 new donors are second only to January 2021 when those same stations added 10,000 new donors to their ranks.

And for good measure, this January, those same stations also added 3,000 rejoins and another 1,000 donors representing a mix of renewal and additional gifts.

With the massive influx of Passport-acquired donors we’ve seen at stations over the past 2 years (Passport is now the largest source of new donors for many stations), it’s possible January’s numbers may signal the start of a new norm where streaming sessions will continue to break records during high profile months simply because the cohort has grown so large and continues to do so.

As the composition of public television donor files continue to change, the challenge for stations will be to keep donors engaged and streaming to help retain these all-important supporters.