Why Netflix’s Top Ten Most Watched List Is The Most Flawed Thing Ever!

Netflix recently self-reported their 10 most watched original films ever but there’s a catch! The films reported by the streaming website can’t be trusted blindly instead one needs to critically evaluate the method through which they report their viewership data.

According to Netflix the Top 10 most watched films within first 4 weeks of release are as follows:

Extraction (99 million)
Bird Box (89 million)
Spenser Confidential (85 million)
6 Underground (83 million)
Murder Mystery (73 million)
The Irishman (64 million)
Triple Frontier (63 million)
The Wrong Missy (59 million)
The Platform (56 million)
The Perfect Date (48 million)

Now first things first, what counts as a view? Well Netflix counts even a 2 minute brief view of a film as a whole view which is a turn from its previous metric of counting only those accounts that watched content for 70% of its total running time. This inflates the data unnecessarily and misleads audiences relying on the information.

Secondly, Netflix has also seen a rise in subscribers which will automatically impact the viewership of the content. When ‘Extraction’ released on April 22nd, Netflix had just added 15.8 million new subscribers at the start of the year. This addition could’ve been the reason the film reached the top spot on the list and not the actual number of accounts who watched the movie.

While Netflix’s attempt to be ‘transparent’ is commendable, there is no point in releasing information that is not accurate or doesn’t paint a proper picture of the outcome. By not revealing its data selection process it is inviting suspicion about the validity of the viewership list and just making it a list of numbers without any meaning.