So much for the black box.
Netflix today has revealed viewership data for 99% of its entire catalog, or about 18,000 titles around the world. It published the numbers in a report, What We Watched, capturing viewing from January to June of 2023. It is the first edition of a planned semi-annual look at viewership on the leading streaming service. The initiative is to document the highs, lows and in-betweens of the platform instead of delivering the customary lists of only the top-performing programming.
“This is a big step forward for Netflix and our industry,” the company wrote in a blog post. “We believe the viewing information in this report — combined with our weekly Top 10 and Most Popular lists — will give creators and our industry deeper insights into our audiences, and what resonates with them.”
Hollywood guilds had long objected to the lack of transparency in streaming data, making the issue a key objective in this year’s dual strikes by the WGA and SAG-AFTRA. Netflix, which has volunteered significantly more information than any of its peers, has since last year published weekly Top-10 lists of viewership and its titles are also represented in Nielsen’s weekly streaming snapshots.
In the blog post, the company explained that it is including any title, original or licensed, that was watched for at least 50,000 hours in the six-month period.
“While this report is broader in scope, the trends reflected in it are very similar to those in the Top 10 lists,” the blog post noted.
There is a methodology change from the Top 10 lists, however. Data in the new report is expressed in terms of hours viewed, which is no longer the metric that Netflix uses to rank its own Top 10 and Most Popular lists. Since June, Netflix has reported “views,” which it calculates as hours viewed divided by runtime. Since then, both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA have adopted that calculation in regard to streaming transparency and performance bonuses in their latest contracts with the studios.
One of the biggest issues with measuring in hours viewed is that it favors content with a longer runtime, which generally are drama series. Films are at an even higher disadvantage. Much like “views,” reporting data in hours viewed also gives no insight into how many accounts completed a title, or even engaged with it past the first episode. This is a value piece of data that all streamers, especially Netflix, use to determine the success of their content.
The top-ranking title in the new report was The Night Agent, with 812.1 million hours of viewing. It was among several new series to chart, along with The Diplomat, Beef, The Glory, Alpha Males, FUBAR and Fake Profile. Familiar originals also fared well, among them Ginny & Georgia, Alice in Borderland, The Marked Heart, Outer Banks, You, Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, XO Kitty and film sequels Murder Mystery 2 and Extraction 2.
“Success on Netflix comes in all shapes and sizes, and is not determined by hours viewed alone,” the blog post cautioned. “We have enormously successful movies and TV shows with both lower and higher hours viewed. It’s all about whether a movie or TV show thrilled its audience — and the size of that audience relative to the economics of the title.”
Katie Campione contributed to this report.
