Netflix Releases Viewing Numbers For 18,000 Titles For First Time (hollywoodreporter.com) 19
For the first time, Netflix has released a comprehensive report of what people watched on the platform over a six month period. It includes hours viewed for every title, the premiere date for any Netflix show and movie, and whether a title was available globally. From the Hollywood Reporter: The list includes worldwide viewing for more than 18,000 movies and seasons of TV (18,214, to be exact) between January and June. Those 18,214 titles all had at least 50,000 hours of viewing over those six months, encompassing about 99 percent of all viewing on Netflix, vp strategy and analysis Lauren Smith told reporters during a presentation of the data on Tuesday. It is the deepest dive into viewing that Netflix (or any other streamer) has ever made public.
Among the highlights: The Night Agent was the biggest title on Netflix in the first half of 2023, racking up 812.1 million hours of viewing. Season two of Ginny & Georgia was second at 665.1 million hours, followed by Korean drama The Glory (622.8 million hours). Wednesday ranked fourth at 507.7 million hours of viewing, despite being released in November 2022. The company is using total hours viewed in this report as a way to measure engagement by its users rather than the "view" formula (total viewing hours divided by running time) it employs to compare titles in its weekly top 10 lists.
Original series and movies dominate the top of the chart, but Smith said the split between original and licensed titles was more even: About 55 percent of viewing was for originals and 45 percent was for licensed shows and films. Suits, which dominated the Nielsen U.S. streaming charts for much of the summer and fall, had a combined 599 million hours of viewing worldwide on Netflix across all nine seasons. The show's first season ranked highest, coming in 67th place with 129.1 million hours. At the other end, a little more than 20 percent of the titles on Netflix's list (3,813 in all) had very little viewing. The company rounded them to 100,000 hours but they would fall between 50,000 and 149,999 hours -- barely a drop in the streamer's more than 100 billion total hours of viewing for the six months. The full "What We Watched: A Netflix Engagement Report" can be downloaded here.
Among the highlights: The Night Agent was the biggest title on Netflix in the first half of 2023, racking up 812.1 million hours of viewing. Season two of Ginny & Georgia was second at 665.1 million hours, followed by Korean drama The Glory (622.8 million hours). Wednesday ranked fourth at 507.7 million hours of viewing, despite being released in November 2022. The company is using total hours viewed in this report as a way to measure engagement by its users rather than the "view" formula (total viewing hours divided by running time) it employs to compare titles in its weekly top 10 lists.
Original series and movies dominate the top of the chart, but Smith said the split between original and licensed titles was more even: About 55 percent of viewing was for originals and 45 percent was for licensed shows and films. Suits, which dominated the Nielsen U.S. streaming charts for much of the summer and fall, had a combined 599 million hours of viewing worldwide on Netflix across all nine seasons. The show's first season ranked highest, coming in 67th place with 129.1 million hours. At the other end, a little more than 20 percent of the titles on Netflix's list (3,813 in all) had very little viewing. The company rounded them to 100,000 hours but they would fall between 50,000 and 149,999 hours -- barely a drop in the streamer's more than 100 billion total hours of viewing for the six months. The full "What We Watched: A Netflix Engagement Report" can be downloaded here.
Tiger King (Score:2)
The only one I was interested in... only about 4,000,000 viewing it. Of course, it's kid of a "one and done" thing.
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Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
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The fact that their original content makes up 55% makes them look good.
They can say things like "blah blah, our competitors are licensing their content, but we know it's our real value"
Just a guess though.
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After scanning the list, I would recommend to take those statistics with a HUGE grain of salt.
Good advice in general but why this list in particular?
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Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
If that were the case, they'd really only need to reveal that to advertisers, and under heavy NDA protection. Nope, the public gets to see this data because the recent union deals with Hollywood extracted it as a concession.
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That's one reason , but I would think that Netflix would generate far more interest from potential advertisers if the stats were at some level public information.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)
Likely because of WGA and SAG-AFTRA contracts. Both contracts contain bonus payment clauses where if a show is popular enough, their members get a bonus payment.
If the numbers are kept private, they stand a chance of losing out on the ability to continue producing original content as few would want to participate as WGA and SAG-AFTRA basically represent the names of Hollywood. Sure they can always go with non-union productions, but those traditionally have been so sketchy that few people participate without quickly joining a union afterwards. Few TV shows could deal with the fact that every season all the talent is brand new - new writers, new actors, etc.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because of unions [google.com], actually. Releasing viewership data was part of the recent SAG-AFTRA and Writers Guild agreements with Hollywood. You're welcome.
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Anyone know why Netflix would release something like this? Traditionally they guard this data closely to keep it out of competitors hands.
TFA addresses this. Two reasons. First, apparently people were upset at Netflix being opaque. Why you'd think Netflix is under any obligation to release this data is beyond me but apparently not beyond other people. Second, I think there was some interaction with the recent Hollywood strikes. The writers and actors wanted to know what's being watched for reasons.
OTOH, I can totally imagine Netflix might want to use these numbers for marketing. How better to advertise a show than to point out how many other
hours viewed / minutes of content / days available (Score:2)
Somebody must have crunched the numbers already to make more meaningful stats: hours viewed / minutes of content / days available. Only taking hours viewed per minute of content into account then The Mother blows the rest away, especially so given it was released late in the period.
The Night Agent: 1,624,200 hours watched per minute of content
The Mother: 2,117,797 hours watched per minute of content
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You've got to take a few more pieces of info into account: cost for production, whether this piece of content worked to acquire a new viewer (or bring back a lapsed one), etc.
This is a big, welcome release but it's only the surface of all the data Netflix has.
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Somebody must have crunched the numbers already to make more meaningful stats: hours viewed / minutes of content / days available.
Yeah, I was just thinking how useless the number of hours viewed is, because without dividing by the amount of content available. you would expect established shows that are still new enough for people to still be discovering them, but have multiple seasons to dominate the statistics.
For an extreme example, if (after several years of not licensing it) Netflix suddenly decided to license Stargate SG-1 (214 episodes, 44 minutes each, 188 hours total) again and promoted it to a bunch of people who hadn't see i
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For an extreme example, if (after several years of not licensing it) Netflix suddenly decided to license Stargate SG-1 (214 episodes, 44 minutes each, 188 hours total) again and promoted it to a bunch of people who hadn't see it, that could wipe the floor with a newer show that has only ten episodes (22 minutes each, 3.6 hours total),
Few people are going to spend the several months of free time it would take to watch all ten seasons of SG-1 in one large binge session. Conversely most won't have a problem watching a couple episodes of the new show each day, especially if they're relatively short, over the next week or so.
My nephew and I totally binged that Jurassic Park cartoon Camp Cretaceous over the course of a couple weekends because we could get three episodes an hour in, whereas our run through of that old classic Knight Rider - h
is this "much"? (Score:1)
I read that Netflix has around 77M subscribers in USA/Canada (not counting shared access if that is still possible). The "top" title is a serie with 10 episodes, each running for about 47 to 57 minutes (had to look it up because I wouldn't watch something like "Agent" or "Crime" things).
So, divided by 10 an episode might have about 80M hours of watching. Since an episode is shorter than 1 hour there is some excess time here - perhaps related to "shared access"?
But it still stands: a top rated title, suppose
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I read that Netflix has around 77M subscribers in USA/Canada (not counting shared access if that is still possible). The "top" title is a serie with 10 episodes, each running for about 47 to 57 minutes (had to look it up because I wouldn't watch something like "Agent" or "Crime" things).
So O(500) minutes of total content. 800 million hours of viewing time, or 48 billion minutes divided by 500 means that 96 million people watched the show out of 247.2 million worldwide users. So ~39% of potential viewers watched the show all the way through. That's actually quite respectable.
Out of the 5.4 billion TV households, that's a rating of 1.7 or so, which means if it were on broadcast TV, it could ostensibly be the #1 scripted show on TV, behind only live sports. If accurate, that's very impres