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> I guess they would measure success by the number of people that will be brought in to subscribe to their service.
There also must be some criteria like amount of current users (who still subscribed each month) and viewers count (for ads). It may be hard to estimate how single show influences first one, but I guess Amazon has complex KPI algorithms for this (it must be).
> but there does seem to be a massive backlash to this.
Is it? It is hard to say how much audience of youtube comments and imageboard users are intersected with subscribers, and how large is silent part of subscribers. There were plenty of backlashes about movies, netflix adaptation even became widespread meme, but netflix still exists without problems. I know few Witcher fans who criticized every bit of that series but still watched it.
> I would say pretty much every man over 25 would know what it is and would have watched it(well up to 70years old maybe).
But do these people know anything about LOTR except from movies? When you don't know anything about Tolkien universe and don't care about it, you wouldn't care much about any perversion that is made to script. Authors may put marvel comics crossover into LOTR and it would be ok for audience that just want some video for evening with beer.