Bingeability and Ad Tolerance: New Metrics for the Streaming Media Age

Binge-watching TV shows on streaming services is becoming increasingly popular. However, there is a paucity of comprehensive metrics to effectively summarize such media watching behavior. We address this gap by presenting two new metrics—Bingeability and Ad Tolerance—to quantify key aspects of watching streaming TV interspersed with ads. These metrics are motivated by consumer psychology literature on hedonic adaptation and also reflect media consumption behavior. Using machine learning methods, including ensembles of classification trees, we identify the key predictors of these metrics, study non-linear effects, and rank the predictors in order of predictive power. The superiority and validity of these metrics is also discussed.