After announcing last month that it will begin to shift the way it ranks its top titles, Netflix today is launching a new website where it will share those metrics every week.
During its earnings call in October, the company said it would shift away from its longtime two-minute viewing time metric to instead rank titles by total number of hours viewed. The new weekly Top 10 hub will update every Tuesday with lists of its top films and series in the following categories: Films (English), Films (Non-English), TV (English), and TV (Non-English). Each list will display the number of hours each top-ranking TV show or movie was watched.
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Each list will track the success of Netflix content during the prior Monday through Sunday period before being published Tuesday. According to the company, the lists will count seasons of series as separate titles, but it will count repeated watches within a season toward that season’s overall watch hours, for example, if you watch a scene in a single episode repeatedly.
All content on Netflix’s app is eligible to appear on these lists, including both its original and licensed shows and movies. The company will also disclose its most popular shows and movies of all time for the aforementioned four categories. As a caveat, however, the company said its figures are “rounded to 10,000 to account for any fluctuations in Internet connectivity around the world.” Titles are ranked based on their first 28 days on the service.
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While the data will shift which titles rank highest, as the company demonstrated in slides it shared during Code 2021 this year, Netflix said in a letter to shareholders last month that it believes “engagement as measured by hours viewed is a slightly better indicator of the overall success of our titles and member satisfaction.” The company said the move is part of an initiative for greater transparency around viewing data.
The new metric will also more closely align Netflix with other viewing metrics, the company said last month, and will give “proper credit to rewatching.”