Earlier this week, our favorite Teddy Bear, NETFLIX’s supreme ruler Sarandos, used the setting of the Royal Television Conference to crow to the world, or at least those in attendance in London, that his company is leading the way in data transparency, chiding his theoretical streaming competition in the process for their unwillingness to share more than a trickle of specifics with those who care the most about numbers–the otherwise forgotten nigglers who analyze, advertise and invest in content. And by week’s end, as if to prove his point, his team bestowed upon us the third iteration of a six-month data dump of tens of thousands of excel rows with cumulative viewership stats.
The first time this occurred, it was seen as groundbreaking and treated as if it were manna from heaven. Literally dozens of stories were dropped by various analysts attempting to draw conclusions about what actually works, not only on Netflix but attempting to apply them to other platforms. And as you may remember, I was among the many who eagerly dug into this; after all, it was released just as most companies were about to go on holiday break, so we all had a lot of time on our hands. It was also nearly six months outdated.
The second gifting, which finished off calendar year 2023, was dropped right before Memorial Day, once again good timing for geeks with decent wi-fi to parse and ponder. A mere five months after the last release date. This time, the 1H24 data was dropped less than three months behind. So–progress! But no holiday weekend convenience beyond just the lamentable official end of summer. And also just before the start of the crucial fourth quarter, so a lot of with day jobs–whatever they may be these days–don’t have quite as much time or bandwidth. Especially when we took a cursory glance at the highlights and saw an awful lot of what we had already previously seen.
Mind you, I’m not the only one who noticed that what we got what was a lot of “dog bites man”. My esteemed former colleague Chip Walters was quite forthcoming in his recent LinkedIn post:
Netflix dropped its worldwide ranker for the first half of 2024 on Thursday. While this is considered transparency these days, I only find it mildly informative. It contains just two metrics, Hours Viewed and Views.
Netflix ranks their list on Views. As a reminder, a View is simply the show’s season total running time divided by total hours viewed. The thinking is, the Hours Viewed metric favors shows with longer total running times (True), and a View allows for a fair comparison between long and short form content. In addition, we are told a View is indicative of engagement (Possibly). In essence it is merely restating the data. There are examples where the View metric tells a great story (CoComelon). But over the last 18 months 76% of shows that were in the top ten in Views were also in the top ten in Hours Viewed. For this reason, I am basing this top ten analysis on Hours Viewed.
Walters’ point is well taken; if you regularly followed the Netflix weekly list releases, you essentially already knew the story.
Our friend and fellow snarker Evan Shapiro happened to be in attendance in London, and he offered his own first blush thoughts from the firing line:
I was at the Royal Television Society Confrence this week, for Ted Sarandos’ keynote where he said “Viewership Transparency Will Be ‘Much More Common’ but Offered No Detail.”
Ted’s exact quote… “I think we’ve been leading the charge, publishing our top 10 list and our annual wrap up list and everything that gives a lot of transparency, and I just expect it to be more and more transparent.”
Yes, when he said that, much of the audience audibly chortled (this being the UK, chortling is de rigueur).
Veteran observer and yet another longtime ally of mine, MEDIAPOST’s Wayne Friedman, rattled his own saber of consternation earlier this week as well:
Netflix, the premium streaming leader of content, has been releasing show-related data for some time — specifically total viewing minutes of TV shows, episodes and movies.
Although Netflix does release viewing data, talent and producers seem to want much more detail.
Can we guess that Netflix has deeper knowledge about the specific audience segments of that viewing — young, old, male or female?
What about co-viewing? What about the details of multi-TV show viewing for one viewing session?
And this even caught the attention and nuanced introspective of the current ombusdman of all thinks media, PUCK’s Matthew Belloni:
So now we’ve seen three of these Netflix “What We Watched” reports, and for the first time we can compare the first six months of one year with the same period in the previous year. Some of my observations:
- Overall, Netflix reported 94 billion viewing hours in the first half of 2024, up only slightly from 93 billion hours in the first half of ’23. But that’s despite the aggressive crackdown on password sharing that most thought would reduce consumption from all those freeloaders. So pretty, pretty good.
- As Sarandos said yesterday, four of the top 10 shows hail from the U.K.: Fool Me Once, 108 million “views,” in Netflix parlance; Baby Reindeer, 88 million; The Gentlemen, 76 million; and One Day, 39 million. I’m not sure what to make of that, except the Brits make good shows.
- The viewing split between TV series and films was also consistent. It’s still 73 percent shows, 27 percent movies.
- Netflix is successfully leveraging the rest of Hollywood to fuel its growth, with licensed shows dominating the chart. Owl & Co. aggregated data based on total viewing hours for each show (as opposed to per season, since some of these shows have lots of seasons), and more than half are off-network licensed shows, rather than Netflix originals.
(ITV’s Fool Me Once, CJ ENM’s Queen of Tears, and Paramount’s Avatar: The Last Airbender were produced by others, but count as Netflix originals, while Suits, Young Sheldon, Grey’s Anatomy, House, Gilmore Girls, and The Walking Dead are wholly owned and licensed outside-studio shows.)
Belloni–or at least someone who ghosted for him– made quite a number of other astute observations worth your while to parse. But the gist once again is–much like THE GODFATHER or ROCKY, the third installment isn’t all that big a whoop.
Moreover, as Shapiro teased, it’s what Sarandos isn’t telling us–and, sadly, not even his competitors who might want to cool his jets are choosing to call out–that’s in his view equally as eye-opening:
This is a company who amortizes their content like no other in media history, creating unobtainable profitability standards the way supermodels do for unreachable body images They announced their “2024 upfront sales increased 150%” but will NOT say 150% of what. The ‘Flix claims their “ad tier subs are up 34%!” but then refuse to disclose what they increased 34% *from* (pardon my dangling preposition). Netflix DOES allow Nielsen to measure their viewership… ish. BUT… We have no idea how much of that viewership is on their AD TIER (the ONLY reason TO measure viewing after all).
On Monday, I’ll show you JUST HOW MUCH viewing Netflix’s ad tier gets – it is truly mind-blowing.
I’ll give you this much of a hint: We’ve both discussed (he much more loudly than moi) exactly how few actual U.S. subscribers to the ad-supported tier Netflix has, and the fact they’re now on their third ad sales chief in 18 months should give some indication of how much unrest there is within Los Gatos about it. It should also not be forgotten that many of those highly-viewed, licensed acquisitions did not come with AVOD rights to insert commercials in them–those opportunistic “arms dealers” sold those windows elsewhere or effectively clawed them back for their own platforms.
But as Friedman points out, even though Prime Video and even Max, Peacock and Paramount+ may have theoretically larger footprints for advertisers, they’re not exactly forthcoming with the actual number of eyeballs their content is getting, and aren’t exactly inclined to tell anyone, either:
(H)ere’s the rub: We know that all premium streamers see the value partly in not giving up too much of that data — which can be used against talent, producers, and advertisers when it comes to negotiation of business deals — of all types.
The problem in calling for more transparency by Netflix now is that non-Netflix premium streamers — Disney+, Hulu, Max, Peacock, Paramount+ and all the rest — are still treading water in terms of still-small net losses in the business, or at best, tiny profits. Asking those streamers to give up whatever salary or cost leverage they have with talent and producers by revealing more data might be a difficult thing to do — considering that the long road to strong profit margins is still way off in the distance.
I’ll be anticipating what Shapiro’s calculations reveal. Frankly, a lot more than I will when Sarandos drops the 2H24 data in our laps. At the rate he’s going with improving the release gap, it’ could be Super Bowl Weekend. If it’s not, that may be the first true sign of transparency from Teddy Bear yet.
Until next time…