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Netflix Releases Another Batch Of Viewership Data, Touting ‘Leave The World Behind’ & ‘One Piece’ — See The Latest Insights
Netflix has just released another round of viewership data.
After pulling back the curtain on its data for the first time last year, the streamer quietly dropped the insights for the second half of 2023, publishing the second What We Watched report on Thursday without as much fanfare as the last round. As Netflix pointed out previously, the initiative aims to document the the full picture instead of the existing glimpses of only the top-performing programming.
According to the report, audiences watched 90B hours of Netflix content from July to December 2023, which is on par with the first half of the year.
The top-ranking title in the latest report appears to be the apocalyptic film Leave the World Behind with 121M views.
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The most-watched series is One Piece with more than half a billion hours viewed, translating to just under 72M total views. In a departure from the first report, Netflix ranked its titles in terms of “views” to align with the way it reports its weekly Top 10 lists.
Netflix also points out that the live-action adaptation also drove viewing for the One Piece anime film and series. In all, One Piece content drove around 50M views — in addition to the viewership for the live-action series — in the second half of the year.
It’s worth noting that the report splits series by season, which means that longer-running series that may have generated far more viewership won’t show up high in the rankings. Essentially, it puts Netflix’s own original content at more of an advantage, or at least levels the playing field, when it comes to these rankings. Otherwise, if seasons were combined, acquired content would dominate many of the top spots.
Case in point: Suits. Last summer, the legal procedural took the streaming world by storm after landing on Netflix, but Season 1 sits at No. 21 with about 27M views from July to December.
In reality, all nine seasons (Season 9 was not available in the U.S. on Netflix) tallied around 146M views — easily surpassing Leave the World Behind. This is likely the case in more than one scenario, as Netflix has several popular, long-running series on the platform that generate constant viewership, like Grey’s Anatomy and Cocomelon.
Also in the Top 10 titles in the second half of the year were Dear Child, Lupin: Part 3, The Witcher Season 3, Sex Education Season 4, Beckham, Who is Erin Carter?, CoComelon Season 8, Virgin River Season 5, and The Lincoln Lawyer Season 2.
Unsurprisingly, the oldies are still goodies on Netflix as well. Titles like Wednesday, Red Notice, and Squid Game continue to generate pretty monster viewership for the platform despite plenty of time passing since their debuts.
Non-English titles made up about a third of all viewing, demonstrating Netflix’s strength across the globe.
The report encompasses Netflix’s entire catalog, meaning that there are thousands of titles. There is plenty to parse through when it comes to this data set. More insights are likely to be revealed in time.