Netflix's expanded viewer numbers don't amount to ratings, but they are a flex

Variety

The streaming service's decision to abandon its "two minute" metric in favor of counting total hours viewed is "is ultimately self-serving — designed to promote its most popular titles," says Todd Spangler. "The release of the additional info is aimed at giving Netflix subscribers new ways to find what to watch next (because the more content individual accounts stream, the less likely they are to cancel). Pablo Perez De Rosso, Netflix’s VP of content strategy, planning and analysis, acknowledged this in a blog post about the new initiative. 'Most of all … we hope our new weekly Top 10 on Netflix will help fans discover new stories and join new conversations,' he wrote. In that sense, the new Netflix info is akin to Apple’s App Store rankings or Spotify’s charts, aimed at driving up usage. More broadly, Netflix is flexing here: It’s underscoring the fact that it operates the biggest subscription-video service on the planet (with 213.6 million paid subs as of Q3). The streamer is giving notice to the industry, customers and Wall Street that it has an engine capable of producing a surprise hit like Squid Game, which (Netflix says) was viewed an astronomical 1.6 billion hours over its first 28 days of release. It will be interesting to see if Netflix rivals like Amazon, Disney and HBO Max follow suit by releasing their own metrics. But here is what Netflix’s expanded data initiative is not. These aren’t 'ratings,' as the TV industry has grown to love/hate them. Ratings are a measure of all viewing across a set of programs in a given time period — including the poorest-performing shows. A comprehensive analysis of Netflix’s on-demand service would span its lineup of thousands of titles, down to the longest-tail, least-watched niche content. TV ratings also provide an estimated breakdown of an audience’s demographic composition, which is a level of detail Netflix isn’t sharing."