Netflix First 6-Month Viewing Report: 18,000 Titles, 100B Hours Viewed
- by Wayne Friedman , December 13, 2023
In a first for the dominant premium video streaming platform, Netflix has released its total global program viewing covering a six-month period, in which 99% of all viewing came from 18,000 titles, with nearly 100 billion hours viewed.
For its report, Netflix released a massive spreadsheet showing every title -- original or licensed -- where over 50,000 hours was viewed.
The top five most-watched programs in terms of hours viewed globally are as follows: “The Night Agent” (Season 1) , at 812.1 million hours, followed by “Ginny & Georgia” (Season 2), at 655.1 million; “The Glory” (Season 1), 622.8 million; “Wednesday” (Season 1), 507.7 million, and “Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story,” 503.0 million.
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It adds that over 60% of Netflix titles released during January and June 2023 appeared on its weekly top 10 lists in terms of hours viewed. Non-English-language stories generated 30% of all viewing in the period.
But just having the largest number of hours over a period of time should not be the only determining factor for whether a show on the streamer did well, according to the company.
“We have enormously successful movies and TV shows with both lower and higher hours viewed,” says the company in a release. “It’s all about whether a movie or TV show thrilled its audience — and the size of that audience relative to the economics [emphasis added] of the title.”
Another motivation for doing this report is to give TV and movie producers more key viewing data points, says Netflix.
“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.”
In an effort to reveal more of its viewing that analysts and third-party measurement companies have made estimates about over the years, Netflix says the report — titled “What We Watched: A Netflix Engagement Report” — will be published twice a year, every six months.
Netflix did not offer additional data -- either for the previous six-month period or the year-ago January-June 2022 period - for analysis and/or comparison to the current January-June 2023 data.
Wayne, this so called "viewing" report seems to be simply a tally of the gross hours of device usage associated with each of these programs. As far as I can determine, Netflix has no way to determine who in a subscriber household watched any of its shows nor whether such viewers were attentive---or even present-----for every minute---or second---while the content was displayed on the screen. Also, tallying all of the episodes together in this manner may produce big---and, to some, very impressive---- numbers but the "legacy TV" way of calculating the average minute rating per episode for each series gives a much more realistic pisture of how many people one show attracts relative to another.