Use Case: Audience Overlap Across Streaming Services

Overview 

Follow this guide for worked example, end-to-end. We're going to build and read an Overlap Report on four major streaming services on Instagram, Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video and HBO Max, to answer the question that an Overlap Report is built for: how much do these audiences actually share? Use this article as the concrete version you can map back to your own basket. 

 The Question We're Answering

Continuing the streaming-services storyline from earlier in the guide, our strategy team already has the macro Demand picture. The next question is more specific:

• How much of each streamer's audience is shared with the others, and how much is genuinely unique?
• Which two streamers are closest to each other in audience, the real head-to-head?
• If we co-sponsored two of these services, would we be duplicating reach or genuinely extending it?

One Overlap Report answers all three, provided the channel and the basket are chosen deliberately.

 Step 1 — Pick the creation method

From the Reports List, click New report. On the Create Report screen, pick the Overlap card, “Discover the overlap between audiences across different social channels”, and click Next.

Step 2 — Pick the channel

Streaming-services audiences are most active and most visible on Instagram, that's where show drops, trailers and fandoms concentrate. We pick Instagram for this report.

If we later want to know whether the overlap shape is the same on TikTok (where the conversation is more meme-driven) or X (where it's more news-driven), we'll clone this report and switch the channel, but one channel at a time.

Step 3 — Name the Report and Add the Accounts

On the Define report screen, name the report “Streaming Wars, Audience Overlap (Instagram)”. The channel is already locked in from the previous step.

In the Add accounts field, type each of the four services in turn,  Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, HBO Max, and pick the right profile from the suggestions dropdown each time. Look at the follower counts in the dropdown to confirm you're picking the main brand account and not a regional or sub-brand variant. After adding all four, the table below shows the four rows with the right handles and follower bases.

Step 4 — Launch

With the name in place and four valid accounts in the basket, click Launch Report. The confirmation screen tells us the report is being built and that we'll get an email when it's ready. Under five minutes later, the report lands.

 Step 5 — Read it, Percentage-First

Open the report. We default into Percentage mode, which is the right starting point for a basket where one account (Netflix) is meaningfully larger than the others.

Scan the off-diagonal cells. The interesting pattern, in a typical streaming basket, looks like this:

• The columns under Netflix are darker than its rows. A large share of every other streamer's audience also follows Netflix, but only a small share of Netflix's audience follows each of the others. Netflix is the gravitational centre of the basket — its audience is broad and contains big chunks of the others'.
• The Disney+ ↔ HBO Max pair shows a noticeably tighter mutual overlap than either does with Prime Video. That's the closest head-to-head in the basket: two audiences that genuinely sit on top of each other.
• Prime Video tends to have a more distinctive shape — its audience overlap with the others is real but lower than the Disney+ ↔ HBO Max pairing, reflecting the broader e-commerce-led footprint of the parent brand.

Reading along the rows tells you who each streamer's audience also follows. Reading down the columns tells you who's pulling the most audience from the rest of the basket.

 Step 6 — Switch to Absolute for the magnitudes

Percentages frame proximity; absolutes frame scale. Switch to Absolute mode and the same cells now read in shared-follower counts.

The most useful re-read: Netflix's rows look small in percentage but enormous in absolute terms. A 5% overlap against a 290M-follower base is still a multi-million shared audience — the kind of number that matters for a co-sponsorship discussion that's really about reach, not affinity.

Step 7 — Graph Mode for the Shape

Switch to Graph mode for the visual. Each account becomes a band, splitting into a unique portion and streams to each of the others.

Two things jump out:

• Netflix has the widest band overall, and the largest single piece of it is “unique”, that's the share of its audience the other three don't reach.
• The streams between Disney+ and HBO Max are visibly thicker than the streams between either of them and Prime Video, confirming the head-to-head you spotted in the percentage table.

Use Compare Sources if you want to drop a streamer out for a focused two- or three-way read, for example, isolating Disney+ and HBO Max to look at the pair without Netflix's scale dominating the picture.

 Step 8 — The Strategic Read

With three modes of the same matrix, the brief almost writes itself:

• Distinctive reach. The biggest “unique” slice in Graph mode is Netflix's. If the campaign needs incremental reach that the others can't deliver, Netflix is structurally where it lives.
• Real head-to-head. The Disney+ ↔ HBO Max overlap is the tightest in the basket. They're chasing the same audience on Instagram, a useful read when positioning a brand against either of them.
• Co-sponsorship redundancy. Sponsoring both Disney+ and HBO Max would partly duplicate reach, especially on the audience subset that follows both. Sponsoring Netflix and Prime Video, by contrast, covers two more distinctive bases.

 Step 9 — Share, Clone, Re-run

Back on the Reports List, the report's lock icon opens the Share dialog: flip the toggle to Public and Copy report link to send the report to a stakeholder who isn't a Demand user. Clone the report from the actions menu to spin off a TikTok or YouTube variation, same four accounts, different channel, to check whether the audience-overlap pattern holds across platforms.

Re-run the same shape of report next quarter and you've got a longitudinal view: a streaming-category audience-proximity map that you can put next to the Demand picture and the Influencer deep-dives to tell a complete story.