The Growing Popularity of Netflix

HISTORY

Netflix started in 1999 via offering an online subscription service where subscribers could select movies and television shows on Netflix’s website, and the shows were then mailed to subscribers in the form of DVDs, along with pre-paid return envelopes, from one of more than 100 distribution centres. Although customers could rent as many movies as they wanted for a monthly fee, the number of DVDs they could have in their hands at any given time was limited by their subscription plans.

In October 2006, Netflix announced the “Netflix Prize” contest for a $ 1 million as award for the person or team who could improve by 10% its recommendation system Cinematch supposed for predicting an users movie preferences based on previous rental data. More than 50,000 people from 186 countries took part in the competition. Netflix gave contestants access to two datasets: (1) a “training set” containing approximately 100 million user ratings of 17,700 films/television programs, all of which were dated but anonymized, and (2) a “qualifying set” containing user identification numbers, the items they rated, and the dates they rated them, but no actual ratings. The goal was to develop an algorithm that could predict how users in the “qualifying set” would rate a specific item based on patterns inferred from the “training set” BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos, a team of seven mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers from the United States, Canada, Austria, and Israel, won the prize three years later, in 2009. (Hallinan and Striphas, 2016).  

Netflix launched a streaming-only plan in 2010 that included unlimited streaming but no DVDs. Company then began offering the streaming-only plan outside of the United States, first in Canada in 2010, then in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2011, and subsequently in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Scandinavia in 2012. 

Netflix began producing original shows in 2012. Lilyhammer premiered first, followed by House of Cards in 2013. Since then, it has produced over 1900 originals, many of which have become hugely popular and have won numerous awards.

Netflix now has around 222 million users in 190 countries. Only few of bigger countries (such as North Korea, Syria, China, and Iran) stand out as exceptions. It has over 15,000 titles across all its international libraries and generates over $25 billion in annual revenue.

AMOUNT OF SUBSCRIBERS

The company’s website, where Netflix investors with financial results, is the most reliable source of information about Netflix’s number of subscribers and revenue: 

https://ir.netflix.net/ir-overview/profile/default.aspx

However, Statista, one of the world’s leading online portals for data on the global digital economy, can be trusted also as Statista gathers data from reputable and mostly original sources. According to Statista, the Netflix subscriber dynamic has been since 2013 as follows: 

VIEWERSHIP DATA

Traditional television, which operates in the advertising market, relies on audience ratings. Netflix has not made viewership information public from the beginning of the steaming business. To highlight the popularity of the platform’s original content, the company began selectively publishing viewership numbers for a small number of original titles in late-2018.

When discussing audience data, Netflix executives frequently make claims that some industry standard is “irrelevant” in the context of streaming television and incompatible with the company’s subscription-based model. 

On December 28, 2018, Netflix made audience data for a specific title public for the first time. More than 45 million Netflix subscriber accounts viewed the Netflix original film Bird Box (2018) in the seven days following its premiere, according to the official Twitter account for Netflix Films (@NetflixFilm). After initially refusing to comment on the metrics associated with this data, a Netflix spokesman explained the next day that a “view” of Bird Box was defined as a subscriber account watching 70% of the total running time including credits, but that this definition was unique to this title and “should not be taken as a metric for all Netflix content” (Spangler, 2018; Wayne, 2021).

In less than a month, in January 2019, the company released the first data on ‘original’ series viewership. Netflix estimated in its quarterly shareholder letter that the recently launched series You (2018–) and Sex Education (2019–) would be seen by more than forty million households in the first four weeks after their premiere (Netflix, 2019a). According to reports in the press, series viewership was defined as a subscriber account watching at least 70% of a single episode of a given show (Porter, 2019a). As of October 2019, Netflix released the most viewed movies and series for previous twelve months.

What is Netflix’s current method of calculating viewership? Netflix is adopting a “hours watched” method of measuring viewership, if someone watches two minutes of a title, it now counts for them as a viewer. And we can see most popular movies in their website: https://top10.netflix.com/ and to access trustable information about featuring movies and shows in reports / letters prepared for shareholders: 

https://ir.netflix.net/ir-overview/profile/default.aspx

Regular updates about “hottest” movies and streaming platforms you can find also in: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com

⬇️ REFERENCES:

• Hallinan B. & Striphas T. (2016) Recommended for you: The Netflix Prize and the production of algorithmic culture. New Media & Society. 2016;18(1):117-137. doi:10.1177/1461444814538646 
• Hosch, William L. “Netflix”. Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Netflix-Inc. Accessed 28 February 2022.
• Porter R (2019a) Netflix reveals viewership numbers for ‘you,’ ‘sex education’ and more. In: The Hollywood Reporter. Available at: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/netflixs-you-track-40-million-viewers-1177025 (accessed March 1, 2022).
• Wayne ML. Netflix audience data, streaming industry discourse, and the emerging realities of ‘popular’ television. Media, Culture & Society. June 2021. doi:10.1177/01634437211022723