Netflix has drastically altered the way it reports viewership and will now report average viewership for its programming as ‘views’.
Said views will be the previous ‘hours viewed’ metric it has been using for a few years, only now it will be divided by total runtime – this has the effect of taking the advantage away from shows with longer runtimes and more episodes.
Hours viewed will still be available, but Netflix will now use this new metric in its Top 10 rankings for both current and all-time popular lists. That’s not all, as they will also expand the measurement window from 28 days to 91 days (a full financial quarter) – giving films and series time to grow.
As a result of the change, there have been some major shake-ups to its lists, with “Wednesday” at 252.1 million views now overtaking the fourth season of “Stranger Things” at 140.7 million views as the most popular English-language series of all time.
The latter benefitted from its sizeable just over thirteen-hour runtime, around twice the length of “Wednesday,” which comes in just under seven hours.
The rest of the Top 10 most popular English-language series of all time list now sees “Dahmer” in third with 115.6 million views, “Bridgerton: Season 1” in fourth with 113.3 million views, “The Queen’s Gambit” in fifth with 112.8 million views, “The Night Agent” in sixth with 98.2 million views, “Stranger Things: Season 3” in seventh with 94.8 million views, “Bridgerton: Season 2” in eighth with 93.8 million views, “The Witcher: Season 1” is ninth with 83 million views, and “The Watcher” is tenth with 79.6 million views.
“Squid Game” still remains Netflix’s most popular series ever after the shift, with 265 million views.
Source: Deadline
