Netflix has released their viewership data for 99% of their entire catalog, totaling around 18,000 global titles. Within a report titled ‘What We Watched‘, Netflix revealed viewership from the first half of 2023. According to Deadline, Netflix plans to create a biannual report showing all of the figures their content experiences, not just for the top performing programs but the entire catalogue. Netflix is including any title, original or licensed, that was watched for at least 50,000 hours in the six-month period.

In the report, Netflix commented, “success on Netflix comes in all shapes and sizes, and is not determined by hours viewed alone. We have enormously successful movies and TV shows with both lower and higher hours viewed. It’s all about whether a movie or TV show thrilled its audience — and the size of that audience relative to the economics of the title; to compare between titles it’s best to use our weekly Top 10 and Most Popular lists, which take into account run times and premiere dates.”

During January-July of 2023, the top-ranking title was The Night Agent, with 812.1 million hours of viewing. Other series debuts featured were Alpha Males, Beef, The Diplomat, FUBAR, Fake Profile and The Glory. New seasons of Netflix originals also gained a lot of traction. Alice in Borderland, Ginny & Georgia, The Marked Heart, Outer Banks, Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, XO Kitty, and You, along with film sequels Extraction 2 and Murder Mystery 2, garnered high viewership.

Since Netflix has started posting its weekly Top 10’s, there has been a noticeable push to be more transparent with their viewership data. As a result of the positive feedback from users of the service, other streamers have adopted their form of a ‘Top 10’. However, the data in the report is used to evaluate under a different metric than Netflix’s Top 10. The report is solely based on hours viewed while the Top 10 is based on hours viewed divided by runtime. According to Deadline, using only one metric to evaluate content leaves out the full picture. In the reports, content with a longer runtime will be severely overrated. Series that have hour-long episodes with eight to ten episodes in a season will have an advantage over films.

As a result of the writer’s and actor’s strike, streaming services agreed to divulge their viewership data. With Netflix taking the first steps to be more transparent, it is expected that other services will follow suit.