Can Opposites Attract?
One of the most popular animated comedies on the air, Rick and Morty, has a sister series in Hulu’s original show Solar Opposites. What can Hulu do to make sure Rick and Morty fans are tuning in?
Have you heard of Solar Opposites? Yes? No? All right, next question: have you heard of Rick and Morty?
We’re betting more of you answered “yes” to the second question than the first, even though Solar Opposites shares a co-creator in Justin Roiland. That’s a problem Solar Opposites producer Hulu is likely working overtime to solve, hoping to bring some of Rick and Morty’s huge, dedicated audience over to its deserving, critically beloved sister series.
Although Solar Opposites looks and sounds so much like a show that’s familiar to TV audiences, it still has to deal with the growing pains that even the greatest TV series experience in their first year on the air. But in promoting the original series, Hulu is probably still looking to take advantage of the show’s similarity to Rick and Morty, targeting users who love the 2013 Adult Swim comedy with ads for Solar Opposites.
Identifying Rick and Morty’s audience is trickier than it sounds. How can Hulu pinpoint the TV fans who love Rick and Morty, but not Solar Opposites? We thought we’d take a crack at the task ourselves using Ranker Insights, which allows us to zoom into the respective audiences of Rick and Morty and Solar Opposites. We’re going to do our best to figure out what unites these groups, what separates them, and what Hulu might be able to do to bring them together.
First, we’ll take a look at the people who have an opinion on both Rick and Morty and Solar Opposites and how they intersect. Here’s how the two fan groups break down according to Insights:
We could spend our time trying to identify this 13% of voters who like Rick and Morty and not Solar Opposites, but whoever they are, they’re probably a lost cause — there’s little use marketing to people who have already made up their minds about the show. The group Solar Opposites should be more worried about is people who don’t know enough about the show to have an opinion, either because they’ve never heard of or haven’t been properly incentivized to care about it.
And from what we can grasp from Insights, that group is a pretty large one! Rick and Morty is an immensely popular, well-known show, so it’s unsurprising that it has an impressive total of just under 100,000 upvotes from Ranker fans since its premiere in 2015. That’s 100 times the total Solar Opposites has amassed over the last year, with just 984 upvotes across Ranker as of the writing of this blog post. From Hulu’s perspective, that’s at least 9,000 Rick and Morty fans who should be over the moon about a new show from Justin Roiland.
We’re not pointing out this disparity to argue that Solar Opposites is inferior to Rick and Morty. The latter show has been on the air five years longer, which is plenty of time to build up the kind of name recognition required to stay at or near the top of highly competitive Ranker TV lists. We’re saying that in that large group of voters who know of one show and not the other, there is an audience Hulu has yet to reach — one Hulu should be trying its best to understand.
We can begin to do that by looking at the voting behavior of Rick and Morty fans on lists that also feature Solar Opposites. A great example is our list of The Best Current Animated Series Airing Now. First, this list has been voted on by almost 8,000 people. That’s a large sample size of TV fans who know and care enough about animated comedies to make their opinions known on this list. Second, of those 8,000 people, more than half gave their opinion on Rick and Morty (as of the writing of this blog, the show has 3,003 upvotes and 1,152 downvotes). Finally, Solar Opposites is further down the list than Rick and Morty, but not so far that voters wouldn’t encounter it without minutes of scrolling (Rick and Morty is #1 on the list, while Solar Opposites is #25).
Compared to Rick and Morty’s 3,003 upvotes, Solar Opposites has just 35. Let’s assume the worst-case scenario for Hulu: that all 3,003 of those voters didn’t also vote up Solar Opposites. Assuming all these people would enjoy Solar Opposites if they knew about it, what can we learn about these 3,003 fans from Insights?
First, we can learn what other shows these fans upvoted on this list. For example, we know that out of the 3,003 people who upvoted Rick and Morty on The Best Current Animated Series Airing Now, 906 (about 30%) also voted up Archer, 1,042 (about 35%) voted up Bob’s Burgers, 775 (around 26%) voted up Family Guy, and 755 (around 25%) voted up American Dad! All these shows are available to stream on Hulu, which means Hulu could easily identify the people who watch them and market Solar Opposites to them more aggressively. We also know that 1,107 of the Rick and Morty fans who voted on this list (37%) also like South Park, 652 (22%) are fans of SpongeBob SquarePants, and 477 (16%) love Robot Chicken. These shows aren’t on Hulu, but if the platform were to get access to data on their fans, Hulu might also have luck marketing Solar Opposites to those fans.
But where it really gets fun is tracking how Rick and Morty fans who voted on this list voted on other lists across Ranker. For example, some of the people who voted for Rick and Morty on The Best Current Animated Series Airing Now also visited our list of The Top NBA Players Of All Time. In that group of voters, 69% voted up Dwayne Wade. Similarly, of the people who voted on our animated show list and the list of The Best Rock Bands Of All Time, 84% of those who upvoted Rick and Morty on one list also voted up Queen on the other. Here are some other examples of insights we pulled from our cross-list correlations tool on the people who voted for Rick and Morty on our target list:
Some of the people who upvoted Rick and Morty on The Best Current Animated Series Airing Now also voted on the lists below. Here’s how those Rick and Morty fans voted:
The Best Characters In The Marvel Cinematic Universe: 85% voted for Dr. Strange, 78% voted for Captain America
Famous Men You’d Want To Have A Beer With: 74% voted for Bill Murray, 72% voted for Dwayne Johnson
The Best Anime Series Of All Time: 80% voted for Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, 68% voted for Tokyo Ghoul
The Best Superhero Movies Ever Made: 90% voted for Guardians of the Galaxy
The Greatest TV Shows Of All Time: 76% voted for Sherlock , 70% voted for Breaking Bad
The Greatest Cartoon Characters In TV History: 91% voted for Batman, 82% voted Bart Simpson
The Best Young Rappers And New School Rappers: 81% voted for Tyler the Creator
The Best Current Female Singers: 60% voted for Ariana Grande
