The streaming megacorp has announced that, with 76 million subscribers tuning into the TV show’s first episode, The Witcher is its most-watched debut season on the network – but the definition of “most-watched” is different now.
Until 2020, Netflix clocked those stats according to subscribers who finished 70 percent of a movie or TV show episode. Recently, however, that metric was reconfigured to count subscribers who finished two minutes instead, or about the same time as a toilet break between accidentally pressing play and swapping back to The Crown. Okay, The Circle. What? I love trash.
According to Netflix, this is about a focus on subscriber intention versus subscriber actions. Because, as everybody knows, intentions and actions are totally the same thing.
“Given that we now have titles with widely varying lengths – from short episodes (e.g. Special at around 15 minutes) to long films (e.g. The Highwaymen at 132 minutes) – we believe that reporting households viewing a title based on 70 percent of a single episode of a series or of an entire film, which we have been doing, makes less sense,” a PR rep explains to Entertainment Weekly. “We are now reporting on households (accounts) that chose to watch a given title.”
So, it’s a convenient coincidence that the new metric boosts that by “about 35% higher on average than the prior metric”, according to the company’s 2019 investor report.
Anyway.
Besides questionable metrics, though, 76 million subscribers choosing to watch even two minutes of The Witcher isn’t a bad result – it’s the millions who watched enough to get that stupid song stuck in their brains forever that we should worry about. O VALLEY OF PLENTY, O VALLEY OF PLENTY.