New Netflix report reveals what we watch, and what we don’t

(NEXSTAR) – Netflix knows what you like, it even offers a percentage chance that you’ll enjoy a new show or movie, but what about the streaming habits of others? For the first time, Netflix released a trove of viewer engagement data Tuesday that reveals which titles people spent the most – and least – time streaming.

If you were a fan of FBI thriller “The Night Agent: Season 1,” you’re not alone. Netflix viewers spent 812,100,000 hours – the most of any title – watching FBI agent Peter Sutherland navigate a deadly conspiracy with ties to the White House.

The second-most viewed title was “Ginny & Georgia: Season 2,” the dramedy by Sarah Lampert that follows free-spirited young mom Georgia, played by Brianne Howey, as she and her children, Ginny and Austin, try to make a new life in New England.

“What We Watched: A Netflix Engagement Report” measures the total hours that viewers spent between January and June of 2023 watching Netflix by the individual show or movie title. The report, which Netflix plans to release twice a year, also notes whether or not the title was globally available and when it came out.

The release date is important to keep in mind, because some of the titles might have drawn massive audiences during a period before the Jan. 1, 2023 start of the data.

See the top 10 Netflix titles below:

Netflix said that more than 60% of the titles released during the time frame of the report appeared on the company’s weekly Top 10 lists.

The report contains data from Netflix’s extensive library, covering 18,000 titles and nearly 100 billion hours of combined viewing time (numbers were rounded to the nearest 100,000). The list represented 99% of Netflix’s titles, but any show or movie that wasn’t watched for at least 50,000 hours was left off.

While “La Reina del Sur Season 3” was the only top 10 show that wasn’t globally available, the opposite was true for the vast majority of titles toward the bottom, including 100,000-hour flicks “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” “Tyler Perry’s The Single Moms Club” and “The New Guy,” among others.

Because movies are only a couple hours long, but a series may have dozens of hourlong episodes, some criticized the rankings as a show of popularity.

“Success on Netflix comes in all shapes and sizes, and is not determined by hours viewed alone,” Netflix said in a news release. “We have enormously successful movies and TV shows with both lower and higher hours viewed. It’s all about whether a movie or TV show thrilled its audience — and the size of that audience relative to the economics of the title.”

The release of the data is an about-face for Netflix, which had long been protective of its internal numbers. During a call with reporters, co-CEO Ted Sarandos denied that the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes which resulted in union contracts that both have data transparency clauses was the prime movie for the report.

“This has been on a continuum for several years, so this is not driven by anything differently than that,” Sarandos said. “I think it’s really important, that’s why I did say earlier, that lack of data, that lack of transparency, the unintended consequence was this kind of mistrust, this environment of mistrust around the data. So this is probably more information than you need, but I think it creates a better environment for the guilds, for the producers, for creators, and for the press.”

The main reason behind the release, Netflix said, was to “give creators and our industry deeper insights into our audiences, and what resonates with them.”