Stranger Things 5 Tops 2025 Streaming

With 40 billion minutes viewed, Stranger Things 5 wins Top Original Series at Nielsen’s 2025 ARTEY Awards. 

At the end of January, Nielsen announced the winners of its 2025 ARTEY Awards, recognizing the most-watched streaming titles of the year. Powered by Nielsen’s Streaming Content Ratings, the ARTEY Awards—short for Audience Rated Television Entertainment of the Year—are uniquely determined by audience viewing minutes and honor the titles that truly captured global attention.

And this year, one series stood far above the rest, for our greatest pleasure at The Yard !

Stranger Things 5 secured the Top Streaming Original Series award with an astounding 39.54 billion minutes viewed in the U.S.—rounded to 40 billion minutes globally celebrated. The fifth and final season delivered not only nostalgia and emotional closure, but also some of the largest single-week streaming totals ever recorded.

According to Nielsen, 25.1 billion of those minutes were generated in just a five-week window, thanks to Netflix’s phased holiday release strategy. Notably, Variety reported that Nielsen’s 2025 calendar ended on December 28—meaning the data does not even include the highly anticipated series finale that dropped on New Year’s Eve and became an immediate sensation.

As reported by Variety, 2025 proved to be a standout year for final seasons of streaming hits, with Stranger Things and Squid Game topping the charts for original programming.

Netflix’s global report continues to show the last season of Stranger Things  at the n°4 position of its all-time viewed shows chart.

The achievement comes during the most heavily streamed year on record. Nielsen reports that audiences spent an estimated 16.7 trillion minutes streaming in 2025—equivalent to 277.6 billion hours, 11.6 billion days, or more than 31.7 million years of watch time. That represents a 19% increase over 2024’s nearly 14 trillion minutes.

Congratulations to everyone at Netflix for this extraordinary recognition !

At The Yard, we are proud to have contributed 507 VFX shots to the final season—helping bring the Upside Down to life one last time.

For a deeper dive into the data and the complete list of 2025 ARTEY Award winners, read Nielsen’s official announcement on their website.

Find out about our work on ‘Stranger Things 5’ here.

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