83 million “watched” 6 Underground, says Netflix. That’s impressive if only they weren’t now counting subscribers who only watch a couple minutes and bailed.
The company switched to a new viewership metric that essentially inflates its numbers by more than a third compared with its previous standard. Netflix said it will now count a title as “watched” if you choose to watch it and let it play for two minutes. That’s it. In the past, Netflix wouldn’t start counting something as “watched” until you got through 70% of the first episode of a series or of a film’s total runtime.
Netflix viewership stats just got more meaningless
Didn’t track exactly how long I tried to watch 6 Underground, but it was more than two minutes every time.
There old metric of at least 70% was a far better metric. I suppose internally they can track both. A statistic for reporting publicly and an internal-only metric which counts the old way. My money is they have internal statistics that go far, far deeper than they’ll ever strategically share with anybody outside the company.
This makes me think about that abysmal auto-play function — that cannot be disabled — whenever you hover over something in Netflix. Is this making me a viewer of everything I pause to do something else and leave on this screen for at least two minutes?
We already knew the viewing stats at Netflix were suspect, just read: The Irishman had 26,404,081 views in the first week, says Netflix – cough, wink, cough.
This just adds another exclamation mark.
Movies, Movies, Movies 