TechScape: From Friends to Squid Game – why Netflix viewing figures matter
Up for discussion in the Guardian tech newsletter: the problem with the streaming company's outlandish claims
I'm going to try to convince you that you should care about exactly how many people watched the moral panic-inducing hit Netflix series Squid Game. Yes, I know there's a lot going on in the world. But bear with me: I think this really matters regarding how we understand our culture - and the balance of power in a media business where data is king.
(As a treat, if you stick with this newsletter then further down I'll tell you about some of the biggest flops that Netflix would prefer you didn't know about.)
British Netflix users spent more time watching old episodes of Friends in 2020 than watching big-budget original series the Crown.
The three most popular new releases in the UK during August were Clickbait (watched by 2.34m Netflix accounts), Hit & Run (2.1m households), and The Chair (1.64m). These are high ratings but Channel 5 can top them.
Sex Education Series 3 was released on the same day as Squid Game and performed just as well in Europe - but has had a fraction of the hype.
Shows such Bridgerton, Afterlife and The Queen's Gambit were all hitting over 80% completion rates in the UK - meaning people were hooked and watched to the end of each series.
At the other end of the market, the five shows with the worst series completion rates were The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (just 35% of viewers finished it), What/If (45%), The Irregulars (53%), White Lines (56%), and Sex/Life (56%) - which explains why most of them were cancelled.
Any film that is watched to the end by 70% of people is a success. Martin Scorsese's big-budget much-hyped Irishman? That struggled, on their metrics.
People now watch original series in a very short space of time - about a quarter of people who watched Squid Game finished it within two days.
Even though Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are not far apart in terms of signed-up users, Netflix dwarfs Amazon when it comes to people actually watching their content.
Oh and almost no one chooses to watch the credits nowadays. Sorry to everyone who made the programmes, we've already autoplayed the next episode.
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