Global streaming giant Netflix made a massive move toward transparency today with its first publicly released engagement report, What We Watched.
The data drop covers all titles on the platform that had at least 50,000 hours between January 1 and June 30 this year.
“That’s over 18,000 titles, and nearly 100 billion hours, capturing more than 99 per cent of all viewing on Netflix,” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said on a media call early this morning.
“Starting today we will publish What We Watched: A Netflix Engagement Report twice a year,” the streamer said.
The global figures put The Night Agent as number one with 812 million hours viewed by the end of June. Behind this was Wednesday with 507 million hours viewed within this timeframe and Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story with 503 million hours viewed.
Celeste Barber’s hit series Wellmania was the most-watched Australian show in the first six months of the year (despite being axed). The biopic True Spirit was the most-watched Australian show overall.
You can see al the data HERE.
The release of the data is a significant move towards transparency for Netflix which first introduced its ad tier last year.
It also comes at a time when writers and actors are increasingly pushing for greater transparency in the sector to counteract tightening pay.
Part of Netflix’s remuneration structure is based on workers and talent getting bonuses for titles that reach certain benchmarks on the platform.
“In the earliest days, it … wasn’t really in our interest to be that transparent, because we were building a new business,” Sarandos is reported as saying. “And by not doing public data, there was something creators liked a lot about it too, which is it took a lot of pressure off the overnight ratings model or the weekend box office model.”
He went on: “the unintended consequence of not having more transparent data about our engagement was it created an atmosphere of mistrust over time, with producers and creators and the press, about what was happening on Netflix. So we’ve been on this continuum of opening things up.
“This is probably more information than you need,”
