Netflix releases viewing data for 18,000 TV shows and movies – The Hollywood Reporter
“The Night Agent” and “Jenny and Georgia”
Courtesy of Netflix
Netflix has taken its biggest step toward data transparency yet with the release of a comprehensive list of viewing time on the platform in the first half of 2023.
The list includes global viewing of more than 18,000 movies and TV seasons (18,214, to be exact) between January and June. Those 18,214 titles all received at least 50,000 hours of viewing during those six months, including about 99 percent of total viewing on Netflix. It’s the deepest dive into viewing that Netflix (or any other streamer) has ever published.
The most notable are the following: Night agent It was the biggest title on Netflix in the first half of 2023, with 812.1 million hours watched. Season two of Jenny and Georgia It ranked second with 665.1 million hours, followed by Korean dramas Glory (622.8 million hours). Wednesday It ranked fourth with 507.7 million viewing hours, despite its release in November 2022.
The company uses total hours watched in this report as a way to measure its users’ engagement rather than the “viewing” formula (total hours watched divided by run time) that it uses 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 balanced: About 55 percent of viewing was for original movies and 45 percent for licensed shows and movies. suit, which dominated Nielsen’s U.S. streaming charts for most of the summer and fall, has generated a total of 599 million hours watched worldwide on Netflix across all nine seasons. The show’s first season ranked first, coming in at 67th with 129.1 million hours.
On the other hand, just over 20% of the titles on Netflix’s list (3,813 in total) had very few views. The company has rounded it up to 100,000 hours but it will fall between 50,000 and 149,999 hours — barely a reduction in the total hours watched of more than 100 billion hours over the six months.
As for the timing of the data release, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said the company is on a “continuum” of becoming more transparent as its streaming business matures. “It wasn’t in our interest to be that transparent because we were building a new company, and we didn’t want to give any competitors a road map,” he said early on. “Creators loved it, too, because they were freed from the pressure of ratings.”
However, Sarandos acknowledged that Netflix’s lack of transparency ultimately had the unintended consequence of “creating an atmosphere of mistrust over time.”
“This is probably more information than you need, but it creates a better environment for us, for the unions” — which won some key concessions on data transparency in the labor strike settlement this year — “for the producers and creatives, and for the press,” Sarandos said.
Netflix plans to continue releasing semi-annual reports on watch time, but Sarandos said he’s not sure other streaming companies will follow his company’s lead (Netflix has the advantage of being the oldest and largest platform, after all). “They’re all running their businesses as they see fit, and they’re all in different places of their existence,” Sarandos said of the other platforms. “We thought very differently about this 10 years ago, too.”
Here are the 20 best titles on Netflix for the first half of 2023.
