Netflix Changes Its Metric for Measuring Viewership

[Peter_Brosdahl]

Image: Netflix



The streaming service arena expanded considerably throughout 2018 and 2019. This in turn has created increased competition for Netflix. Most services now have a hit show or movie under their belt and tracking viewership is essential for investors. Netflix has just published their Q4 earnings report which also explains how they’ve changed their metric for tracking viewership.



Their original unit of measure was based on 70% of a show, or film, being watched. The new approach is being called a “Choose to watch” model. It counts viewership as when someone chooses to watch a show for at least two minutes. The idea is that at that two minutes the choice to watch was intentional. Netflix’s new reporting method is measuring roughly 35% higher viewership than the previous one. Using The Witcher as a new example they reported that over 76 million people clicked on the new show to...

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[Grimlakin]

Do you have any idea how often I'll get 20 minutes into watching something on Netflix to abandon it and never log into it again?

 

[xGryfter]

Same. I think a 50% watch would be far more accurate.

They obviously aren't going for accuracy but a slightly less obvious way of inflating their numbers for investors. 5 years ago this probably would have worked better but their shows have gone downhill so hard in the last few years that, even if I intentionally click on a show to watch, odds are it'll be so bad I'll stop watching halfway through.

That being said if viewership for an entire series is tracked on a per episode basis, even if their numbers for the first episode are inflated it'll still show a major drop going into the second and so on. If the entire series s based on how many people watch the first two minutes of the first episode then these numbers are completely useless.

 

[Brian_B]

Meh, it's just semantics. If you watched 2 minutes of a show you weren't just flipping channels, and that's all they are trying to discriminate between. I would be surprised if the delta between those that watched at least 2 minutes and those that watched at least 50% (or whatever) is a huge number anyway.

And since Netflix doesn't charge or get paid per view, they get a flat sub from me, and they are paying the production costs out of pocket - they can really come up with whatever metric they want to... it's all on them honestly. The "Views" metric is just an e-peen measuring stick for their investors to be able to look at, and for the company to be able to come up with some sort of ROI metric on their investment in the programming.