No, you’re not the one particular person spending an excessive amount of time on Netflix. The typical Netflix person spent 16 days streaming content material from January to June this yr, in response to new knowledge launched by the streaming service.
After two years of customers and the press counting on Netflix’s High 10 lists and Nielsen knowledge to find out Netflix’s most watched content material, the corporate simply opened the floodgates to a wealth of data that may give extra perception into how viewers use the streaming service. On Tuesday, it dropped a dataset of 18,000 exhibits and flicks (which make up 99% of its catalog), itemizing what number of hours of viewership they every amassed within the first six months of 2023. And it plans to proceed releasing this data each six months.
Ginny & Georgia was one of many high performing sequence throughout the January to June interval, with almost 1 billion hours watched, the equal of 110,410 years. Different high performers had been The Night time Agent and Fits, with a respective 93,000 and 68,000 years-worth of hours considered.
“That is the precise knowledge we use to run the enterprise,” co-CEO Ted Sarandos mentioned in a press briefing on Tuesday. Altogether, Netflix’s 238.4 million subscribers (as of June 30) spent almost 100 billion hours watching Netflix over the six-month interval.
All through Netflix’s existence, “The one fixed is that individuals are asking for extra viewing data,” Sarandos mentioned. By not offering it, the corporate took strain off creators to provide breakout hits, however it additionally unintentionally constructed an environment of distrust that the corporate is now trying to restore, he mentioned. The announcement follows months of negotiations with labor unions representing Hollywood writers and actors, wherein the unions demanded better transparency from studios.
Netflix is publishing the uncooked knowledge within the identify of such transparency, which “creates a greater atmosphere for the [writers’ and actors’] guilds, for us, for the producers, and for the press,” in response to Sarandos. Whereas advertisers may discover this knowledge helpful in making selections on learn how to spend their budgets, Netflix will proceed to make use of third-party knowledge to find out the price of advertisements.
However the knowledge, whereas informative, doesn’t give a complete image of the corporate. Because it has set six-month parameters, it isn’t an goal gauge of recognition. Wednesday, for instance, premiered in November whereas the hours considered metric begins in January. The present ranks decrease than Season 2 of Ginny & Georgia, which launched in early January and advantages from its early watchers being included within the metric. Netflix additionally has no plans to interrupt down the information into month-by-month or country-level lists, Sarandos mentioned, as a result of that may supply intelligence to its rivals.
Different streaming providers have largely adopted Netflix’s instance in guarding title-level viewership knowledge, so Netflix’s transfer could lead on others to comply with go well with. “Will probably be as much as them,” Sarandos mentioned, including that rivals are in a distinct part of the streaming enterprise and that 10 years in the past, Netflix thought otherwise about sharing knowledge as effectively.