Entertainment: For transparency, Netflix to release viewership data
Mumbai: Responding to criticism against viewership transparency, Netflix Inc. has released viewership data on top-rated movies and shows.
The streaming giant with over 200 million subscribers worldwide aims to provide viewership insights instead of revealing the number of subscribers watching the programs, the media reported on Thursday.
Earlier, Netflix displayed a list of popular titles based on the number of subscribers who watched at least two minutes of a show. The OTT platform will now provide title rankings based on the total number of viewing hours. They will report hours spent watching the top 10 TV shows and movies for English and non-English titles.
The company revealed 149 viewing hours for the action film Red Notice since its release on Friday last week, thus making the Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot, and Ryan Reynolds starring the most popular English language movie on the platform.
It crowned Squid Game as the most popular non-English show, while Narcos topped the TV list.
The company refrained from traditional reporting viewership rating methods because it does not entertain advertisements on its application across devices.
Netflix Content Strategy Vice-President Pablo Perez De Rosso said, “Figuring out how best to measure success in streaming is hard, and there’s no one perfect metric. Traditional measures like box office or share of the audience, designed to help advertisers understand success on linear TV, aren’t relevant to most streamers, including Netflix.”
“This is an important step forward for Netflix, the creators we work with, and our members. People want to understand what success means in a streaming world, and these lists offer the clearest answer to that question in our industry,” he said.
(Avya Mathur)
