What People Watch

The fifth episode of LOL: Last One Laughing UK ranked as the fifteenth most viewed programme on Amazon Prime Video since we started reporting the content viewed on the service in 2022. Based on a Japanese show called Documental that first aired in 2016, the UK has been somewhat late to the party, but audiences don’t seem to mind.

The programme, hosted by Jimmy Carr and Roisin Conaty, attracted a 7-day audience of almost 3m for episode one. That extended to 6.2m over 28-days, as awareness of the show built. So, LOL:UK certainly delivered viewers for Amazon. But, as John Cleese didn’t say, what else?

Just here for the LOLs

When trying to understand a show’s impact beyond audience size, a useful consideration is not just what the programme did for Amazon, but what it did to competitors.

Isolating those who viewed LOL:UK, we can examine their viewing time on other services before the series was available to view, and then while they were watching. This shows a marked increase in time spent with Amazon, as we would expect. We also see declines in time spent with other services that are ahead of the average. LOL:UK viewers reduced their average time with Disney+ by -7% compared to -4% for all individuals, while their time with Netflix declined by -13% compared to an average of -8%.

Time with Apple TV+ also declined sharply, while time with Paramount+ rose sharply. Both are moving from low bases, but the impact of MobLand on Paramount+ is certainly a factor for the increase in time there.

Also interesting is the decline in time with YouTube among LOL:UK viewers. Against an increase of +3% in average TV-set time with YouTube, viewers of LOL:UK spent -9% less time with the service.

Chart 1: Popular programmes draw viewers from the competition

Existing format – new viewers

As mentioned above, LOL:UK was late to the party. There were (at least) 26 iterations in other countries before the format got its UK incarnation. Some were measured by Barb. The Irish version debuted on Amazon on January 19th 2024. In the UK, LOL:Ireland gained a 28-day average audience of 194k for episode 1. In the 28 days after the UK version of LOL dropped, the Irish version accumulated an audience of 948k for the same episode.

Bringing in an audience almost five times that of the original is clearly a fantastic way to derive value from a piece of content released more than a year earlier. We can also demonstrate that around a third of the audience to LOL:UK had not watched any content on Amazon in the month prior to the series release.

Chart 2: A third of LOL:UK viewers were new or returning Amazon viewers

LOL:UK could provide template for a cost-effective way to avoid churn

All subscription services must fight against customer churn. With a third of the audience for LOL:UK not having viewed any content on Amazon in the 35 days prior to drop on March 20th, it may be that we see an increase in comedy content on the service.

We can see that 12% of viewing on Amazon between January 2024 and April 2025 was to comedy programming. That is close to the Disney+ figure of 13%, but behind the average of 19% on Netflix.

We have discussed churn before, noting that just five shows can account for around a quarter of viewing to the top 100 programmes on a service. In the case of Netflix, those shows are all comedy titles like Friends. In 2024, that figure for Amazon was 31% and only one of its top 5 shows, The Big Bang Theory, is an outright comedy.

Production costs are also a consideration. James Farrell, Head of International Originals at Amazon MGM Studios, said in an interview for the New York Times in January 2024 that “for the price of one of those big U.S. shows [like Reacher or The Boys], I can make 20 versions of ‘LOL,’ and in aggregate those 20 ‘LOL’s will do as well”.

Series two coming in 2026

You might think that having used an A-list of UK stand-up talent, LOL:UK could only be a one-off series. Well, the original Japanese version has completed thirteen series, while in Germany there have been four series and a Christmas special. With comics from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland untapped and a few English comics probably still available, it should come as no surprise that LOL:UK will film series two this year and reach our screens in 2026.

Barb data will be ready to reveal if LOL:UK series two can do more for Amazon than series one ever did.

Doug Whelpdale is Head of Insight at Barb.

Doug also shares some of these insights in the following video: