Netflix Second Stats Release: What’s in a View?
Following Netflix’s first-ever viewing hours statistics release covering the first half of 2023, I wrote a short Medium article containing some rudimentary data analysis. With their second half 2023 stats, my hope was that it would be possible to go a little more in-depth. This new report has some previously unavailable features: runtime and “views.” In addition, results are split into film and television segments.
Unfortunately, the views statistic is not as useful as it could have been. To understand why, we need to understand how Netflix defines a “view.”
Prior to the last quarter of 2019, a view occurred when a subscriber watched 70% of a film or 70% of a single episode of a TV series. Then, a view was redefined as the watching of two minutes of any title. Finally, in June 2023, Netflix settled on its current definition: total hours watched divided by runtime.¹
Since the runtime of virtually all content created for mass consumption is readily available to the public, anyone can calculate a title’s Netflix-defined “views” based on its “hours viewed” statistic. If Netflix had retained its 2019–2023 view definition we would know, for example, the average time viewers watched a particular TV series or movie and, by extension, what percentage of the total runtime they made it through. Unfortunately, this was not to be.
For what it’s worth, let’s compare film and TV viewing for the second half of 2023. Films accounted for approximately 28% of total runtime for all listed titles and 27% of hours viewed.²
Hmm… it seems Netflix subscribers are somewhat medium-agnostic, but maybe “film” and “TV” are becoming artificial constructs. Is a movie shot exclusively with digital cameras really a film? Have typically one-season K-Dramas turned TV series into long movies with user-defined intermissions?
Next, let’s try to actually put some numbers to something I teased in my previous article. How does viewing for a specific title decline over time? First, we’ll consider the K-Drama “Squid Game.” It was released in September 2021 and, in the first half of 2023, garnered 87.2 million viewing hours. In the second half, that figure jumped to 117.1 million hours. It is doubtful new Netflix subscribers could have accounted for such an increase. Maybe it had something to do with the release of “Squid Game: The Challenge,” a reality / game show based on the “Squid Game” plot. This title garnered 270.6 million viewing hours despite not being released until November 22, 2023. Perhaps some viewers who watched “The Challenge” then watched “Squid Game” for the first time, or watched it again.
What about titles that didn’t get a spinoff-triggered boost? I’ll add up how many viewing hours titles released in the first 10 days of January 2023 racked up in the first half of that year, and divide the sum into their total second half viewing hours. It turns out the ratio is: 0.0994.
In other words, viewing hours appear to decline by 90% in months 6–12 following a title’s release versus months 0–6. This figure was remarkably consistent across the dozen titles I sampled, with the only real exception being “The Way of the Househusband: Season 2 // 極主夫道: シーズン2,” which only declined 41%. Some of the titles were released globally, and some were not. One, “Ginny & Georgia: Season 2,” actually finished in second place for hours viewed in the first half of 2023, while others were much farther down the rankings.
In my prior article, I speculated that Netflix viewership trends might be analogous to the decline curve of an oil well, and that could very well be. The Energy Information Administration states that, in shale plays (West Texas, Northwestern North Dakota, etc.), well production decline is hyperbolic.
Or, maybe, Netflix content behaves more like a radioactive element with a “tenth-life” instead of a half-life metric. If so, viewership could be written V₀ * 10⁻ⁿ, where V₀ is hours viewed during the first six month period following release, and n (n = 1, 2, 3…) represents succeeding six month periods. This would be a case of exponential decay and, if correct, our dozen-title sample released in early 2023 will come in at just 1% of its viewing hours for the first half of 2023 when the first-half 2024 stats drop.
What about some of my other predictions from the previous article? I had looked for non-English characters in content titles and estimated that 21% of viewing hours are spent on non-English language films. Searching specifically for Hangul (Korean alphabet) characters, I calculated that 8.4% of Netflix viewing hours were spent on Korean content.
As luck would have it, Netflix addressed these statistics in a press release accompanying its second-half 2023 viewership numbers. It stated non-English content made up “nearly a third” of all viewing, while Korean content weighed in at 9%.³
So, while my Korean content estimate was certainly very close, my overall non-English content estimate was probably around 10 percentage points low. This is likely due to the fact that some non-English titles do not contain non-English characters. One example is the 2022 Spanish-language drama from Colombia: “The Kings of the World // Los reyes del mundo.”
Finally, what about the overall viewing trend indicated by the semiannual reports Netflix has released so far? Some quick arithmetic shows viewing hours declined around 3.7% from the first half of 2023 to the second.⁴
Even if Netflix still relied exclusively on subscription fees for revenue, any apparent decline in viewership would not have been considered a positive. Given that it now offers an ad-supported subscription tier, viewership declines have to be taken even more seriously. Two reports do not make a trend, but this is something that anyone interested in Netflix should be watching when the first-half 2024 numbers are released. Stay tuned!
Footnotes
¹ Porter, Rick. Netflix’s New View Metric Is Easier to Grasp, but It Still Doesn’t Say a Lot, The Hollywood Reporter, 06/22/2023, retrieved 07/29/2024.
² Formula used to determine percent of runtime for films:
Film Hours Viewed / Film Views * Number of Film Titles / (Film Hours Viewed / Film Views * Number of Film Titles + TV Hours Viewed / TV Views * Number of TV titles)
³ Netflix. What We Watched the Second Half of 2023, 05/23/2024, retrieved 07/28/2024.
⁴ Netflix only reported on titles that were watched 100,000 hours or more during the relevant six-month period.
