Netflix has published a comprehensive guide to its most watched shows covering some 18,000 titles.
The streamer says What We Watched: A Netflix Engagement Report will now be published every six months. Included are the hours viewed for every titlem original and licensed, watched for over 50,000 hours, the premiere date for any Netflix TV series or film; and whether a title was available globally.
In a press briefing, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said the most effective way to measure engagement was viewing hours as it mirrored third paries such as Nielsen, making Netflix very easy to compare to other streaming services. “Over time, we’ve been getting increasingly more and more transparent about what people are watching on Netflix. When we started streaming 16 years ago, it was a pretty exotic proposition. There were no other streamers to compare to us, and comparing live TV or live +7 to Netflix on demand was like comparing apples to oranges.”
Over 60% of Netflix titles released between January and June 2023 appeared on the weekly Top 10 lists, which have been published since 2021.
The most-watched show was spy thriller The Night Agent, released in March 2023, and recording 812,100,000 hours viewed. Season 2 of comedy-drama Ginny & Georgia is in second place with 665,100,000 hours viewed since its January release. Its two-year old first season is ninth.
Non English stories generate 30% of viewing as demonstrated by The Glory, which is in third place with 622,800,000 views after its December 30 release.
Significantly, from January to June 2023, 55% of our viewing came from Netflix films and series, with 45% from licensed titles.
One example is the show Suits, which has previous been available on Peacock and Amazon, and features several times in the Netflix data. Sarandos said Netflix had been able to find a new audience for it. “That’s the combination of our large subscriber base and our recommendation system that knew to put suits in front of people we’re going to love it the most.”
