Netflix has taken its biggest step toward data transparency yet with the release of an exhaustive list of viewing time on the platform in the first half of 2023.
The list includes worldwide viewing for more than 18,000 movies and seasons of TV (18,214, to be exact) between January and June. Those 18,214 titles all had at least 50,000 hours of viewing over those six months, encompassing about 99 percent of all viewing on Netflix, vp strategy and analysis Lauren Smith told reporters during a presentation of the data on Tuesday. It is the deepest dive into viewing that Netflix (or any other streamer) has ever made public.
Among the highlights: The Night Agent was the biggest title on Netflix in the first half of 2023, racking up 812.1 million hours of viewing. Season two of Ginny & Georgia was second at 665.1 million hours, followed by Korean drama The Glory (622.8 million hours). Wednesday ranked fourth at 507.7 million hours of viewing, despite being released in November 2022.
The company is using total hours viewed in this report as a way to measure engagement by its users rather than the “view” formula (total viewing hours divided by running time) it employs to compare titles in its weekly top 10 lists.
Original series and movies dominate the top of the chart, but Smith said the split between original and licensed titles was more even: About 55 percent of viewing was for originals and 45 percent was for licensed shows and films. Suits, which dominated the Nielsen U.S. streaming charts for much of the summer and fall, had a combined 599 million hours of viewing worldwide on Netflix across all nine seasons. The show’s first season ranked highest, coming in 67th place with 129.1 million hours.
At the other end, a little more than 20 percent of the titles on Netflix’s list (3,813 in all) had very little viewing. The company rounded them to 100,000 hours but they would fall between 50,000 and 149,999 hours — barely a drop in the streamer’s more than 100 billion total hours of viewing for the six months.
As for the timing of the data release, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said the company has been on a “continuum” of becoming more transparent as its streaming business has matured. Early on, he said, “It wasn’t in our interest to be that transparent because we were building a new business, and we didn’t want to give any competitors a roadmap. Creators liked it too, because they were free from the pressure of ratings.”
Sarandos acknowledged, though, that Netflix’s lack of transparency eventually had the unintended consequence of “creating an atmosphere of mistrust over time.”
“This is probably more information than you need, but it creates a better environment for us, for the guilds” — who won some key concessions on data transparency in settling labor strikes this year — “for producers and creators, and for the press,” Sarandos said.
Netflix plans to continue issuing semiannual reports of its viewing time, but Sarandos said he wasn’t sure other streamers would follow his company’s lead (Netflix has the advantage of being the oldest and biggest platform, after all). “They’re all running their businesses as they see fit, and they’re all at different places in their existence,” Sarandos said of other platforms. “We thought very differently about it 10 years ago, too.”
Netflix’s top 20 titles for the first half of 2023 are below.
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