The era of streaming services being reticent to share viewership information appears to be ending, as Netflix, one of the biggest in the biz, is now touting the arrival of its twice-yearly “What We Watched: A Netflix Engagement Report.”
Though the streamer has shared “top 10" and “most popular” lists since 2021, this is its biggest and most comprehensive move toward transparency in terms of what its audience is actually consuming; according to a blog post from Netflix, the report reveals details for January through June of 2023, covering over 18,000 titles (“99% of all viewing on Netflix”) and close to 100 billion hours of viewing time.
The findings, the post notes, aren’t entirely surprising to anyone who’s been keeping tabs on Netflix’s top 10 lists, since “over 60% of Netflix titles released between January and June 2023" made it into those top 10s. Returning shows were reliably popular (Ginny & Georgia, Alice in Borderland, The Marked Heart, Outer Banks, You, Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, XO Kitty, and movie sequels Murder Mystery 2 and Extraction 2). New shows that went viral and built up devoted fandoms also pulled in big numbers (examples given: The Night Agent, The Diplomat, Beef, The Glory, Alpha Males, FUBAR, and Fake Profile).
Also interesting—30% of all viewing came from non-English stories, and there’s longevity for certain titles, even on a platform known for enabling bingeing and moving on to the next thing: “All Quiet on the Western Front, for example, debuted in October 2022 and generated 80M hours viewed between January and June.” The report also notes that “older, licensed titles” remain popular.
Though the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes earlier this year were not mentioned in the Netflix release, both union contracts stipulated that streaming data be made more transparent and available as part of their terms (WGA here; SAG-AFTRA here).
Want to sift through all that data yourself? You can download the report here.