TV & Radio

Netflix’s reluctance to share viewing figures might not be a bad thing

Streaming service’s new top 10 lists offer some insight but should we really care?

Action comedy Red Notice is the most watched English-language film on Netflix at the moment.

Hugh Linehan's face
Hugh Linehan
Sat Nov 20 2021 - 07:00

How many people watch Netflix’s different movies and series? The world’s most popular streaming service has been opaque about how its titles are really performing. What are they hiding? After all, TV and radio have their ratings, cinema has its box-office returns, even newspapers tell you how they’re doing (or they used to,; more of that anon). But Netflix was a black box. The company might occasionally issue press releases about a particular title breaking records or topping its charts, but the charts themselves were sporadic and unclear.

That changed on Tuesday, when Netflix launched Top10.Netflix.com, a site providing weekly reports on the total minutes viewed for its most-watched movies and TV shows. There are four main global lists: film, non-English-language film, TV and non-English-language TV. Last week's chart-toppers across the four respective categories were comedy actioner Red Notice, starring Ryan Reynolds, Dwayne Johnson and Gal Gadot (148.72 million hours viewed), true-crime Italian movie Yara (17.95 million hours), the third season of Narcos: Mexico (50.29 million hours) and the still popular Squid Game (42.79 million hours).

In a blog post, Netflix VP of content strategy, planning, and analysis Pablo Perez De Rosso acknowledged criticism of previous attempts to give information, which had focused on how many member homes had streamed at least a couple of minutes of a particular title. “So this summer we went back to the drawing board,” he wrote. “People want to understand what success means in a streaming world, and these lists offer the clearest answer to that question in our industry.” Unlike previous Netflix figures, these ones will be independently audited by accounting firm EY.

In addition to the four global categories, Netflix offers less detailed regional snapshots of what’s playing well in specific countries. These can be hard to decipher – they don’t break down the hours watched per title in those countries – but it’s interesting to note that Ireland, for example, is the only European country where the racially-themed drama Passing features in the top 10 (presumably due to the presence of local hero Ruth Negga). And it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, with both Deck the Halls and Father Christmas is Back among Ireland’s favourite mid-November titles.

READ MORE

Should we care? The use of audience figures as a marketing tool by the entertainment industry began with the music charts of the 1950s, which begat a slew of radio and TV shows that for many defined the pop culture of the Sixties and Seventies. But the advent of legal and illegal digital downloads, and then of streaming, robbed the weekly announcement of its allure some time ago. Cinema had followed music’s lead in the 1970s, with the blockbuster era bringing jargon such as “opening weekend” to the masses. By the turn of the century, even general-interest media was infested with talk of weekend grosses, along with breathless comparisons with the numbers of millions generated by previous hits. But who actually cared? Meanwhile, media continued its long-term project of eating its own tail by reporting in ever-greater detail on the market data generated by research companies such as Nielsen. At some point in the last 20 years, for example, Irish journalists decided that the JNLR audience figures produced quarterly for the benefit of the radio industry were of sufficiently pressing importance to their readers that they deserved lengthy analysis and dramatic graphics showing the winners and losers, despite the fact that the changes were generally either marginal or statistically insignificant. Even newspapers got in on the game, trumpeting their circulation figures, until, in the words of Spinal Tap’s manager, their appeal started becoming more selective. The research was quietly discontinued and the trumpets were sold for scrap.

It's hard to see that the obsession with the numbers generated by films in the first few days of their release has had anything but a negative effect on the quality of the films themselves

All of this data is harvested by companies for good business reasons, so they can attract more subscribers or charge more for their ads or make more successful products in future. Whether the information belongs anywhere outside the business pages or the trade publications is another matter. The music charts were a locus of excitement and change for baby boomers but they atrophied over the following decades into a bland and soulless marketing exercise. It’s hard to see that the obsession with the numbers generated by films in the first few days of their release has had anything but a negative effect on the quality of the films themselves, squeezing out the offbeat in favour of franchises and sequels.

It so happens that the shift to digital has given media and entertainment companies access to detailed data that they could never have dreamed of getting in the old analogue days. The irony is that, despite Netflix’s cautious move this week, they’re now determined to keep most if it to themselves. Which might not be a bad thing.

LATEST STORIES