Cagey With the Engagey? Why Netflix's New 'Engagement Report' Doesn't Tell Us Much About Its Tough Viewership Year
With Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos recently, amid the backdrop of the Hollywood guild strikes, declaring a new era of greater viewership metric transparency, the streaming company on Tuesday released a spreadsheet tallying total worldwide viewership hours for more than 18,000 titles for the first six months of 2023, covering 99% of the platform's total streaming during that period.
It's an exhaustive spreadsheet that can be downloaded via a link found this Netflix press release. (Viewing hours are rounded up to the closest 100,000.) It's certainly the most ratings data that Netflix has released at any one time.
The season 1 debut of Shawn Ryan's The Night Agent led all Netflix movies and TV, tallying more than 812 million viewing hours worldwide from its March 23 premiere date through June 30.
The release of this data indeed marks a further progression of transparency for Netflix, which started releasing total-hours-viewed metrics weekly back in June 2021 for its top 10 domestic and foreign-language movies and shows.
But it seems like Netflix isn't telling us everything.
For one, since the Engagement Report is new, we can't compare it to, say, the first six months of 2022.
In June, Next TV added up total viewership data for the Netflix's four ranked "Global Top 10" categories from January - May, and compared it to the same period from 2022.
We found at the time that overall viewership was down around 4%. Netflix disputed our methodology. And right around the time our story was published, the streaming provider made a fundamental change to its Global Top 10 rankings that made it much harder for us to compare the last six months of 2023 to the same period last year.
Netflix started ranking its shows based on total number of "views" rather than hours viewed, although the latter metric was still included in the weekly reports.
From observing the leading edge of Netflix shows as we do every week, it's clear to us that 2023 lags way behind 2022 in terms of audience.
There have just been markedly fewer hits. And the hits are smaller.
This year, two shows, The Night Agent and Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, rank on Netflix's top 10 all-time list of original series that produced the most hours viewed in their first 28 days on the platform.
Last year produced four titles on that list, as well as those that ranked Nos. 1-3.
