Streaming
Netflix is revising its top 10 – and finally wants to show what’s really popular
The top 10 function at Netflix gets a new calculation basis
Which series and films are most watched? Netflix is surprisingly reluctant to answer this question. Now the streaming king wants to make his leaderboards more transparent.
What are the others looking at? Netflix hardly answered this question for a long time. Only with the introduction of the top 10 series and films on the surface did you get a better impression of what is actually popular with streaming pioneers. But even with this measure, Netflix was repeatedly accused of only picking the raisins. With a new measure, the group now wants to ensure more transparency.
Netflix announced on Tuesday in a blog post. The company admits frankly in the introduction – and is now promising to do better. With a website called “Top10 on Netflix”, the group now wants to reveal every week which series and films were best received around the world and in individual countries.
Who is watching what?
Netflix also wants to change its previously used and extremely controversial practice for measuring success. Previous rankings only indicated how many accounts viewed content in the first two minutes. Whether they kept looking or switched off annoyed – it didn’t matter. The informative value left something to be desired accordingly. Netflix probably saw that too. “Figuring out how best to measure streaming success is really difficult. And there is no perfect value,” the provider admits.
Instead of the initial minutes, a new model has now been chosen: From now on, Netflix will list the total minutes that a series or film has been watched – regardless of how many people saw it or when it was switched off. On closer inspection, this has an interesting effect: series that are seen by many people due to a certain hype get competition from those that attract fewer viewers, but then captivate them for longer.
“Squid Game” remains undefeated
In order to make past hits comparable with the new success measurement, Netflix also lists its longest-watched films and series, based on the number of hours watched in the first 28 days. The clear number 1 in the films is thus the thriller “Bird Box” with Sandra Bullock, in the series, no “Squid Game” even comes close to the rank: With 1.6 billion hours, the hype series had over two and a half times as many Viewers like the runner-up, the first season of “Bridgerton”. The series has also been number 1 in the German top 10 list since September. A shame: The total number of minutes for a single country is still not revealed.
In any case, the Netflix list is still not as transparent as it would actually be desirable. After all, the group also has all the values such as the average viewer numbers for individual episodes or the most frequent moment for a termination. And the collected minutes also reveal which content is seen often – but not which one would rather avoid. Such data remains hidden in Netflix’s archives.
This is certainly also due to the fact that Netflix does not see this form of transparency as a function of the lists. “People want to know what constitutes success in the streaming world and these lists are the clearest answer to that,” the Post explains. And then reveals what the service is primarily about with the measure: “Above all, we hope that our new weekly top 10 will help the fans to find new stories,” it says frankly at the end. Above all, they should do what the previous lists have achieved: draw the audience’s attention to new content. And to bind them to the streaming service in this way.