The Most Watched Netflix Shows Ever
As part of a presentation at Vox Media’s Code Conference in Beverly Hills this week, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos revealed some eye-opening statistics about the service’s most watched titles. The company is famously very protective of its data and viewership numbers, but it has in the past occasionally revealed its “most popular” films and shows.
Almost all of those lists — including one we previously reprinted on our site about the most popular Netflix movies ever — are based on the number of Netflix accounts that watched “at least two minutes” of a film or a series. In other words, if you tried Emily in Paris for four minutes, despised it, and never watched another second of it again for the rest of your life, you count towards its total. (According to Netflix Emily in Paris has been watched by 58 million accounts — for at least two minutes.)
So that sort of list tells you something, but it doesn’t really reveal a show or movie’s true popularity. (Stick a title at the top of enough Netflix homepages and you’ll get millions of people clicking on it just because it’s the first thing that shows up when they load up the app.) These new numbers from Netflix are different, because they are based on the “total view hours per title in its first 28 days of Netflix.” So these “most popular” shows are the ones that people actually watched for the most amount of time. They tried it, they liked it, and then they binged the heck out of it.
Per Netflix, here are the top ten most watched Netflix shows according to that metric:
The Most Watched Netflix Shows Ever
Now we can probably think of some flaws with this list too. It only tracks a show’s first 28 days of release, so if a show is a big word of mouth hit that builds slowly as people find it and talk about it, it’s not going to be here. (That’s probably why the later seasons of Stranger Things made the cut, but not the first one.) It’s also a measure of the sheer amount of time spent watching a show — which gives a huge advantage to series with longer seasons and 60-minute episodes over 30-minute ones. There’s almost no way for a show with six 30-minute episodes to compete on a list like this with a show that aired 12 60-minute episodes. (It would be worthwhile to see a similar list that just considered the watch time for 30-minute shows.)
Still, this is an interesting and valuable list for what it is. And it’s worth noting that whether you measure popularity by total watch time or by the number of accounts that have sampled the show, Bridgerton comes in at number one. However you slice it, that really is the biggest show on Netflix right now.