Netflix to tweak its top 10 ratings; to show titles by number of accounts watching and total time

‘Squid Game’ is still on top of Netflix’s list while ‘Wednesday’ is its best English title pushing ‘Stranger Things’ to the second position

The Netflix logo is displayed on the company’s website, Feb. 2, 2023, in New York. Netflix gave audiences first looks at some planned and upcoming projects including ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender,’ ‘One Piece’ and the third season of ‘Bridgerton’ at a fan event on Saturday, June 17 | Photo Credit: Richard Drew

OTT giant Netflix will soon feature an updated weekly top 10 rankings. The streamer will sort its titles based on views instead of total viewing time, even though that figure will still show up on the weekly lists.

This view tally apparently comes from dividing the total time spent watching a series or movie in a given week by the running time to arrive at the number of Netflix accounts that watched a series or movie. This method will neither factor in repeat viewing of a show or movie by the same account nor reflect the total number of people watching.

The platform claims the change will offer a more easily comprehended number to represent popularity, and also helps level the playing field for shows and films with shorter running times. Netflix will also extend the time frame for its all-time top 10 lists from 28 to 91 days (four weeks to 13 weeks) in hopes of better accounting for long-term popularity, and also order it by accounts viewed.

Here’s an example of how the numbers game will work. For the week of June 12-18, Extraction 2 had 88.4 million hours of viewing time worldwide. Dividing that by its run time of 124 minutes yields 42.8 million views. Similarly, for web series, season six of Black Mirror led in hours viewed (58.7 million), but the final season of Never Have I Ever had more accounts watching on average — 11.5 million vs. 11.3 million for Black Mirror — thanks to a slightly shorter running time.

On that account, Squid Game is still on top of Netflix’s list while Wednesday is its best English title pushing Stranger Things to the second position. Wednesday had 252.1 million views over 13 weeks (1.72 billion hours divided by a six-hour, 49-minute running time) to 140.7 million views for Stranger Things 4(1.84 billion hours divided by a running time of 13 hours and four minutes). Season one of Squid Game gathered 265.2 million views over its first 13 weeks.

Considering Netflix subscribers count worldwide is 232.5 million as of the first quarter, the view counts for Squid Game and Wednesday are higher. Presumably, not every Netflix account holder has watched those two series, it shows how repeat viewing can factor into the tallies.