“The Night Agent” and “Ginny & Georgia”
Courtesy of Netflix
Netflix has taken its biggest step toward data transparency yet by releasing a comprehensive list of viewing times on the platform in the first half of 2023.
The list includes global views of more than 18,000 films and television seasons (18,214 to be exact) between January and June. Those 18,214 titles were all watched for at least 50,000 hours during those six months, accounting for about 99 percent of all titles watched on Netflix, Lauren Smith, vice president of strategy and analysis, told reporters at a presentation of the data on Tuesday. It's the deepest look at television Netflix (or any other streamer) has ever released.
Among the highlights: “The Night Agent” was the biggest title on Netflix in the first half of 2023 with 812.1 million viewing hours. The second season of “Ginny & Georgia” came in second with 665.1 million hours, followed by Korean drama “The Glory” (622.8 million hours). Despite releasing in November 2022, Wednesday ranked fourth with 507.7 million viewing hours.
The company uses total hours viewed to measure its users' engagement in this report, rather than the “view” formula (total hours watched divided by running time) that it uses to compare titles in its weekly top 10 lists .
Original series and films dominate the top of the chart, but Smith said the split between original and licensed titles is more even: About 55 percent of viewers came from original series and 45 percent from licensed series and films. “Suits,” which dominated Nielsen’s U.S. streaming charts for most of the summer and fall, was viewed for a total of 599 million hours across all nine seasons worldwide on Netflix. The series' first season ranked 67th with 129.1 million hours.
On the other hand, just over 20 percent of the titles on Netflix's list (3,813 in total) were watched very rarely. The company rounded them up to 100,000 hours, but they would be between 50,000 and 149,999 hours – barely a drop from the more than 100 billion total hours the streamer saw over the six months.
As for when the data will be released, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said the company is “continuously” becoming more transparent as its streaming business matures. Early on, he said: “It wasn't in our interest to be so transparent because we were building a new business and we didn't want to give competitors a roadmap.” The creators also liked it because they weren't subject to the pressure of reviews. “
However, Sarandos acknowledged that Netflix's lack of transparency ultimately had the unintended consequence of “creating an atmosphere of mistrust over time.”
“That's probably more information than you need, but it creates a better environment for us, for the guilds” — which won some key data transparency concessions in resolving labor strikes this year — “for producers and creators, and for the press,” Sarandos said.
Netflix plans to continue issuing semi-annual reports on its viewership, but Sarandos said he wasn't sure whether other streamers would follow his company's lead (Netflix has the advantage of being the oldest and largest platform, after all). “They all run their businesses the way they see fit, and they’re all at different points in their existence,” Sarandos said of other platforms. “We also thought about it completely differently 10 years ago.”
Below are Netflix's top 20 titles for the first half of 2023.