With demand increasing for more detailed streaming
platform metrics, Netflix -- the dominant U.S streaming platform -- says it will begin publishing a weekly “Top 10 on Netflix” every Tuesday.
In a blog post, Pablo Perez De Rosso, vice
president-content strategy, planning and analysis for Netflix, says the data will be based on hours viewed from Monday to Sunday the previous week for both original and licensed titles.
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detailed lists will include global top 10 lists each for films (in English), TV (in English), films (non-English) and TV (non-English), as well as program/movie rankings in over 90 countries. The site
is available in English and Spanish.
Top current movie for the most recent week, Nov. 8, is: “Red Notice” (English language), which pulled in 148.7 million hours globally. The top
TV series is “Narcos: Mexico” (English) with 50.3 million hours.
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“Figuring out how best to measure success in streaming is hard, and there’s no one perfect
metric,” writes Perez De Rosso. “Traditional measures like box office or share of audience (which was designed to help advertisers understand success on linear TV) aren’t relevant to
most streamers, including Netflix.”
Netflix believes engagement -- measured by hours viewed-- is its best indicator of popularity and satisfaction, which it adds is “important for
retention in subscription services.”
Perez De Rosso says while hours viewed does favor longer series and films, “it’s hard to capture the nuances of different types of
entertainment with one metric.” In that regard, he says, Netflix will also occasionally publish specialty lists — for example, top documentary features or reality shows.
This year,
Nielsen launched top 10 lists of streaming content -- for original TV series, acquired TV series and movies -- and for overall content for top streaming platforms Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Disney+ and
Apple TV+. Nielsen calculates data in terms of billions of minutes viewed for an individual week.
One viewing metric neither Netflix nor Nielsen provide in their respective current metrics is
the number of people watching a specific piece of content.
“Some people will ask why we don’t also report the number of members that finish a show or film,” asks Perez De
Rosso.
“We believe that whether you miss the end of one episode in a 10 hour series ... or you don’t wait for the Easter egg in the credits sequence, or you rewatch one scene multiple
times rather than the whole film, all that viewing should be reflected in the popularity of the title.”
Netflix says its most popular English-language film ever is “Bird
Box,” which has had 282 million viewed hours. The most popular English-language TV series to date is “Bridgerton” (season 1), with 625 million hours viewed. The highest non-English
language TV series goes Netflix's massive current hit "Squid Game" with a eye popping 1.6 billion hours viewed -- more than two times that of the first season of "Bridgerton".