Why you should be skeptical of Netflix's most-watched show data

Los Angeles Times

Netflix data should be greeted with a "heaping scoop" of salt, says Meredith Blake. "To start with, not even Netflix is claiming these 'top 10 lists' are definitive," says Blake. "A representative for the company said the shareholder letters include select highlights but are not intended as 'a comprehensive list of the most-watched titles.' Unlike Nielsen, which measures the U.S. only, Netflix is available in 190 countries. Netflix also counts anyone who’s watched 70% of a single episode as a viewer, meaning if you watched the first 45 minutes of the first episode of Umbrella Academy and then turned it off, you’d be included as a viewer. This would be like ABC reporting on the premiere ratings for the first Roseanne Barr-less episode of The Conners, then never mentioning how many people tuned in the next week. A far more useful metric would be average per-episode audience. But these cherry-picked figures allow Netflix to boast about its most obvious successes without putting them in any kind of useful context. Clearly, a lot of people are watching Stranger Things. But how much of an outlier is it? The numbers shed virtually no light on how many people, on average, are watching hundreds of other shows on the service, from critical darlings like Russian Doll to oddball cult favorites like the recently canceled The OA."