Join the businesses who have begun to edge out competitors by scouring the web for alternative data.

In 2015, Polish videogame developer CD Projekt Red ($WSE:CDR) released The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt to universal acclaim. More than 1.5 million people pre-ordered the game. Since then, the series has sold more than 40 million games and is considered to be one of the best games of the past decade.

But that was 2015, and sales of The Witcher franchise since then had cooled off a bit, as an older title typically does. That was until Netflix announced that it would release a TV series based on the game in late 2019. The show has since received positive reviews and has been renewed for a second season.

And in all that time, the TV show has fired up interest in the game franchise, sending it back up the sales-rank charts at major e-commerce retailers.

At GameStop.com, The Witcher titles had been sinking in average sales rank since at least 2016. But beginning last fall, when word got out that Netflix would be releasing the show, the game — and associated toys — began selling on average as well as it had four years ago. Sales even spiked in December days after the show premiered on December 20.

At Amazon.com, where only the top-100 items are tracked, The Witcher had all but disappeared from the site's sales ranks between August 2017 and last fall. But then in October, when details for the Netflix show were first revealed, the titles shot to the top-10 at Amazon, peaking at 4 out of 100 on October 9, 2019. As of this week, the series still ranks in Amazon's top-100.

The show, it certainly appears, is turning the Witcher brand mainstream (not that selling 40 million units in the first place isn't already mainstream enough). Facebook followers and likes of the brand have taken off since the show's release.

Facebook likes for The Witcher were 1.45 million in mid-December, just before the show launched. Since then, the followers count has risen to 1.54 million — a gain of 90,000 new followers in just over a month.

About the Data:

Thinknum tracks companies using the information they post online - jobs, social and web traffic, product sales, and app ratings - and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue, and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales.

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