Netflix has unveiled a new top 10 portals to display audience statistics for its biggest shows, finally continuing its slow and steady path towards transparency around its numbers.
top10Netflix.com is a new website for tracking the top 10 shows or movies on the Netflix platform, showing the total number of hours viewed as well as the number of weeks a title was in the top 10. You can also divide into English vs. Non-English titles and country view, allowing you to customize your search based on what has been high-profile in your area.
"We believe engagement as measured by hours watched is a slightly better indicator of the overall success of our titles and member satisfaction," Netflix bosses said in a recent letter to shareholders. “It's also consistent with how third-party services measure TV viewing and assign appropriate credit to replay. "
It's... a busy website, with lists of titles and the nations where they were best received. And we can't help but think that many users will find such a portal superfluous. Anyone who's had an account for a few years is already getting on-demand content from their old viewing habits, with a row of "Top 10" titles in their own region. So what is the need for this dedicated and somewhat flashy site?
As we've seen, the top 10 charts can be a bit weird to watch. They show the interest of the general viewer, which means that a user has likely seen at least one of them, but hardly anyone will have seen all of them. It's a very different take on the regular Netflix experience, which involves nudging you toward content the algorithm expects you to like.
This move makes sense for Netflix's trajectory over the past year. Little by little, the streaming service has become less suspicious of its viewers' stats, lifting the veil on how it works.
We have received a lot of feedback on our measurements over the years. So we got back to the drawing board and today we are excited to launch https://t.co/a9X2usRUun, a new website with global and national weekly listings. of the most popular titles on Netflix ranked by viewing hours pic.twitter.com/JMrvzmRv8s November 16, 2021
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Some caveats about stat-sharing are understandable: It can be hard to justify canceling a show if you're inviting fans to see your numbers. And, as long as Netflix maintains an element of secrecy about how it tracks a "hit" title, it's free to manipulate those numbers however it sees fit.
However, it is a very different image these days. Rather than focusing on viewers exceeding the two-minute mark, top10Netflix focuses on the total number of hours watched. Netflix is now on a scale where those numbers are staggering: Squid Game has only watched 1.600 billion hours, which is equivalent to 182.000 years of interaction.
Netflix has found that it helps flex your muscles rather than silently celebrating your successes. It now operates in a market with countless competitors released each year, not just Amazon Prime Video and Disney Plus, but also Apple TV Plus, Peacock, Paramount Plus, and more.
The latest season of The Morning Show even features the launch of a fictional “UBA +” service on the dramatic media giant, proving that even the content on these platforms is keeping up with the state of the market around it. And it makes sense for Netflix to flaunt its numbers and improve its image, at a time when many different companies are hot on its heels.
Netflix is finally gaining momentum
For years, Netflix's unofficial tagline, "Netflix and chill," has matched the company's appearance as a laid-back alternative to other viewing options.
Unlike Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV, which are always riddled with buy, rent / buy options, or Hulu, which forces ads to stop even on paid subscribers, Netflix has provided a seamless experience for years, a experience that focuses on content and nothing else, even auto-start episodes to reduce the friction of selecting a new one.
But Netflix is now leaning toward its multiplex ambitions: winning awards, releasing movies in theaters, and even buying theaters for a growing Netflix operation. Co-CEO Ted Sarandos even had to silence rumors that the company was buying an entire chain of cinemas.
This latest website is a sign of Netflix's scale and ambition. It has an incredible audience, at a time when Apple TV Plus is still too hesitant to publicly reveal its numbers. It shows a subscriber base enthralled by viral shows, like Squid Game, even breaking down language barriers to become global hits.
Netflix is so confident in its own success that despite the decline in US subscribers during the pandemic, CEO Reed Hastings can describe it as "a short-term wobble" for a "silky-smooth" operation. Netflix executives may well believe that their company is too big to fail right now. At the very least, it is incumbent upon the state of Netflix to act as it does.