The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.
Earlier this week, Netflix did an uncanny thing: It released viewership statistics. To be clear, the streaming giant has done this before—adding a top 10 carousel to your screen here, dropping a nugget about the popularity of Stranger Things there—but these numbers were different. These numbers were special. Unlike Netflix’s previous metrics, which counted anything watched for at least two minutes as a “view,” the stats released Tuesday ranked shows and movies by total hours watched—and they were global. Whereas Netflix had previously been cagey about its viewership, this seemed like a vast opening of the statistical vault. “‘Nonsense.’ BS.’ ‘Cherry-picked.’ ‘Unaudited.’ We’ve had a lot of feedback about metrics over the years,’” Pablo Perez De Rosso, Netflix’s head of content strategy, planning, and analysis, wrote in a blog post. “So this summer we went back to the drawing board.” The move seemed bold, daring.
It was also, as Todd Spangler pointed out in Variety, “a flex.” The streaming service now has some 213 million subscribers, and it wants the world to know they are devouring hours of content. Previously, Netflix has gotten a lot of mileage out of the mystery behind how popular its movies and shows are—everyone seems to be talking about Bird Box, but who actually watched all of it? Not revealing the details allowed the company to shrug off duds. But now that it has the numbers to show exceptional viewership, it’s claiming bragging rights.
This bit of data transparency is also coming at a time when Netflix needs to show off all the Ws it can. After years of being the primary go-to for streaming content, it’s starting to lose cool points—if not actual eyeballs—to newer services like HBO Max and Disney+. If putting up a splashy new website reminds you that Red Notice is the biggest deal in the world right now, it’s in the company’s best interest to do that. That’s not a joke, by the way. According to Netflix’s numbers, the action-comedy starring The Rock, Ryan Reynolds, and Gal Gadot was watched for 148.72 million hours globally in its first week of release.
But what does that really mean? It’s hard to tell. Red Notice is an hour and 57 minutes long, so that could mean nearly 78 million households watched it all the way through, or 149 million subscribers watched about half of it, or 300 million people watched about 30 minutes, or … you get the idea. But that’s not really the point; the point is that now you’re wondering if people have watched that many hours of Dune or Ted Lasso or something else on a competing streaming service. Releasing the numbers is Netflix’s way of showing how relevant the streamer is in the pop culture conversation. It’s also practically a dare to other services to release their numbers, too.