What We Watched: A Netflix Engagement Report
Netflix has released its first biannual report called “What We Watched: A Netflix Engagement Report.”
The report covers what people watched on Netflix over a six-month period, including:
- Hours viewed for every title, original and licensed, watched for over 50,000 hours
- The premiere date for any Netflix TV series or film
- Whether a title was available globally.
This report, downloadable here as an Excel spreadsheet, covers over 18,000 titles, representing 99% of all viewing on Netflix and nearly 100 billion hours viewed.
In the first half of 2023, more than 60% of the titles released by Netflix made it to their weekly Top 10 lists. Although this report covers a wider range of data, it shows trends that are consistent with those seen in the Top 10 lists.
When analyzing the report, it is essential to keep in mind that Netflix wants to emphasize the following points:
- Success on Netflix comes in all shapes and sizes and is not determined by hours viewed alone.
The streamer has had great success with movies and TV shows that have been viewed for shorter and longer periods. The key factor that determines this success is whether the content of the movie or TV show captivates the audience and the size of that audience in relation to the economics of the production.
One of the primary Netflix metrics is called “adjusted view share”, a combination of more than 30 factors attempting to assign an overall “value” for any content.
- To compare titles, use the weekly Top 10 and Most Popular lists based on run times and premiere dates.
The report, combined with weekly top 10 and most popular lists, will provide creators and insiders with deeper insights into Netflix’s audience and their preferences.
Back in 2021, the streamer launched the weekly Top 10, and in June 2023, it changed its viewership metric from “hours watched” to “views”. The views metric is calculated by dividing the number of hours watched by the total runtime of the movie or episode.
