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- Netflix provided a rare look at its internal data while showing off a list of its most popular original movies and shows
- However, there’s one major issue with the numbers that means the claims need to be taken with a grain of salt
- Read more about Netflix here
After firing the opening shot in the Streaming Wars over a decade ago, Netflix has hemorrhaged content at a fairly alarming pace thanks to the many shots fired by the competitors who’ve scrambled to stake a claim in the space.
As a result, the streaming giant has attempted to plug those wounds by focusing on the projects it produces in-house; earlier this year, the company revealed its plans to drop a staggering $17 billion over the course of 2021 on the Netflix Originals it’s increasingly relied on to keep people from defecting to other platforms.
There was once a time when “Netflix Original” was practically synonymous with “must-watch,” and while there’s been a noticeable decline in the quality of the movies and shows it’s pumped out at an impressively brisk pace, it would appear the company is doing something right based on the fairly rare glimpse it recently provided at some of its internal data during this year’s Code conference.
On Monday, Netflix head honcho Ted Sarandos sat down to shed some light on the most popular original films and series on the platform he’s tasked with overseeing. Based on the numbers, Extraction, Bird Box, and Spenser Confidential are the top-performing original movies, while the first seasons of Bridgerton, Lupin, and The Witcher took the gold, silver, and bronze when it comes to original shows.
Netflix
However, there is a very important disclaimer tucked at the bottom of that slide. If you squint hard enough, you can see that Netflix’s definition of a “view” refers to any account that watches a title for a whopping total of two minutes, which seems like a fairly suspect metric for gauging the popularity of a piece of content.
It’s safe to say the shows on that list pass the smell test much better than the movies, as most of those titles seem to have sparked a fair amount of the all-important Online Discourse compared to the likes of Enola Holmes and Project Power. When you consider most people usually give things more than a couple of minutes before deciding to commit to them, I’d love to see how many viewers actually ended up finishing all of these, but I assume there’s a reason we didn’t get those numbers.