Stranger Things.
Photo: YouTube
Netflix is making good on its promise to start disclosing viewership stats on a regular basis. Reversing years of secrecy, the streaming giant today will start releasing a weekly report revealing not only the most popular programming on the service but exactly how many viewing hours those titles accumulated around the world over the preceding seven days. Updates are set to be issued every Tuesday โ thereโs even a spiffy new website โ and will feature lists of the ten most-watched TV shows and movies on Netflix, with separate tallies for English-language and non-English programming. Although these new numbers wonโt be anywhere near as revealing as the Nielsen ratings used for linear TV, they nonetheless represent a significant development in the battle for streaming-data transparency.
In a new blog post explaining the move, Netflix VP of content strategy, planning, and analysis Pablo Perez De Rosso acknowledged the criticism of the companyโs past attempts to offer insights into whoโs watching what. โSo this summer we went back to the drawing board,โ he wrote, framing the commitment to weekly reporting along with the previously announced switch to the hours-viewed metric (earlier, the metric measured how many member homes had streamed at least a couple of minutes of a title) as an attempt to course correct. โPeople want to understand what success means in a streaming world,…