A New System: Netflix revised the way it calculates its Top 10 TV Shows and Films lists this week, adding a new metric called "views." Views are equal to the total number of hours that a program is streamed on Netflix within its first 91 days on the site, divided by the program's total run time. So for example, the film "Extraction 2" was viewed for 88.38 million hours in its first week on Netflix, from June 12-18. It's 2.07 hours long, so that means it received around 43 million Netflix "views." Some Uncertainty Remains: Of course, this still becomes a little difficult to parse, particularly when comparing Netflix programs to shows on linear television or other streaming platforms. We don't know how many PEOPLE are watching the Netflix content during the "hours viewed" that the streamer is recording, and we also have no idea how much of any given show or film those people are watching. Does everyone who checked out "Wednesday" for the first 3 minutes have their 3 minutes counted along with the total views? Or is it just people who got through a decent chunk of the show? A Minor Shift: So far, it doesn't seem like Netflix's new metrics are going to completely overhaul our sense of the platform's most popular content. The biggest shift is that the first season of "Wednesday" moved into the #1 spot, as Netflix's most-popular English-language season of TV to date. (Korea's "Squid Game" still holds the overall global title.) The previous English-language record-holder was "Stranger Things" Season 4, but because it was so epically long -- just over 13 hours in total -- "Wednesday" had more viewers on a per-minute, per-episode basis. Otherwise, the rest of the list remained fairly static. |
