Netflix’s New View Metric Is Easier to Grasp, but It Still Doesn’t Say a Lot

Rick Porter
·6 min read
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The “view” is back.

With a tweak to the way it reports its internal top 10 rankings, Netflix is once again foregrounding a measure of how many accounts are watching its shows and movies.

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This version of a view, by the company’s definition — total time spent watching a movie or season of a TV series, divided by the running time — is certainly easier to understand than Netflix’s previous “view” stats. There’s a danger, though, in equating views with actual viewers, and the watch time/run time equation doesn’t get much closer to revealing how many people are watching a given title (to say nothing of data like completion rates and subscriber retention, which streamers say are key to their decision-making processes for series renewals but almost never come to public light).

Industry unions have made data transparency a key part of their current contract negotiations with studios and streamers; the Writers Guild of America, for instance, proposed a viewership-based residual to reward shows with bigger audiences, with “require[d] transparency regarding program views.” The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, representing the media companies, rejected that proposal and didn’t make a counteroffer, according to the WGA. Netflix’s small steps toward revealing its viewing data remain ahead of its rival streamers — which almost never disclose any hard numbers on their series and films — but the new “view” measure is more a restatement of data Netflix already reported than a big move ahead.

Netflix says the change to its rankings came about as it highlighted its hours-divided-by-run-time view statistic in publicity emails, and it “proved to be a more relatable metric for many people.” The company will now rank its top 10s by views rather than total hours (but continue to show the latter), saying that the new metric is “anchored in engagement — our best measure of member satisfaction and a key driver of retention (which in turn drives our business)” and that it levels the playing field somewhat for shows with shorter running times. For its all-time top 10 lists, Netflix also lengthened its measurement from four to 13 weeks.

The company also says it will “continue to share more granular, title-specific data with creators.”

Those changes now make Wednesday the No. 1 English-language series on the streamer, displacing season four of Stranger Things. The switch in ranking is due almost entirely to Wednesday’s substantially shorter running time: Stranger Things 4 has 120 million more total hours of viewing, but since it’s also more than six hours longer than Wednesday, its view count is much lower.

To be fair, Netflix’s new math on views is much easier to understand than some of its old metrics. Before it switched to hours viewed in the fall of 2021 — on the heels of Squid Game’s runaway success — Netflix employed two different “view” standards, both of which said very little about the totality of viewing for its catalog. First, it counted a view when any member account that completed 70 percent of a movie or 70 percent of a single TV series episode. In the last quarter of 2019, it switched to counting two minutes of any title — long enough to show “intent” to watch, the company said — as a view. The 70 percent standard made little sense for TV series in particular, and the two-minute count was more akin to view tallies on YouTube (where 30 seconds of watching counts as a view) and social media platforms.

The total viewing time metric Netflix has used for the past two years is similar to Nielsen’s weekly streaming reports, which rank the top series and movies by minutes watched in the United States.

Netflix’s equation for calculating views — total time divided by run time — isn’t new: The Hollywood Reporter has occasionally employed it to contextualize total viewing time data going back more than two years. It works best with feature films, where dividing viewing time by running time for a given week yields the equivalent of X number of full showings of that movie. Netflix says its users worldwide spent 88.4 million hours watching Chris Hemsworth’s Extraction 2 in its first week; with a running time of 124 minutes, that equates to about 42.8 million full showings of the film (or more precisely, 42.77 million; Netflix rounds to the nearest hundred thousand).

That doesn’t mean, however, that 42.8 million Netflix users watched Extraction 2 from start to finish in its first week. Some people might have watched it multiple times, while others may have bailed after 20 minutes. “Might” and “may” are necessary because all the view equation really shows is the number of complete runs contained in the total viewing time.

The math gets fuzzier with series. The final season of Never Have I Ever had the equivalent of 11.5 million complete watches for June 12-18 (56.4 million hours divided by a run time of four hours, 55 minutes). How many of those 11.5 million full-run equivalents were actual binges of the show? It’s impossible to know. Two Netflix users watching five episodes each would add up to the same amount of viewing as one account binging the entire season.

Things get weirder still in Netflix’s all-time top 10s. Both Squid Game (265.2 million views over 13 weeks) and Wednesday (252.1 million views) have more views than Netflix has ever had subscribers — that number stands at 232.5 million worldwide as of the first quarter of 2023. The most popular film on the service, Red Notice, also had more views in its first three months (230.9 million) than Netflix had paid accounts (about 221.6 million) at the time.

The first-blush implication is that literally every Netflix account has watched the entirety of those three titles, which is simply not the case. (At least one Netflix account, residing in this writer’s home, hasn’t finished any of the three.) It’s true that the sky-high view numbers for those three titles speaks to engagement; there’s no way they don’t include rewatches by at least some users.

All those big numbers just reiterate what we already knew, though: that Squid Game, Wednesday and Red Notice were massively popular. By only revealing its top 10 — and the same goes for Nielsen, whose weekly streaming releases only list the top 10 titles across multiple platforms — the snapshot of streaming is like taking a picture of the penthouse of a skyscraper rather than the whole building. Underneath that are the vast majority of programs and movies whose numbers never see the light of day. Even if some of that data is shared with creators — and based on what some striking writers have noted, it’s not always a lot — it remains opaque to the press, to shareholders, and to viewers who might be interested in how their favorite shows and movies are doing.

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