‘Squid Game’ Is Massive, Netflix Is Top-Heavy: Takeaways From the Latest Data Drop
Netflix has released its latest six-month trove of viewing data, and if the compilation of more than 15,000 series and movies points to anything, it’s how big a phenomenon Squid Game is.
Season two of the Korean hit was the most watched series worldwide in the second half of 2024, in both Netflix’s preferred view metric (86.5 million, measured by dividing viewing hours by running time) and total viewing time (619.9 million hours). Remarkably, it did all that in just six days — season two premiered on Dec. 26.
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In under a week, Squid Game drew 69.5 million more viewing hours than the second-place show in that measure — Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, which accumulated 550.4 million hours in three-plus months after its Sept. 19 premiere. In views, Squid Game had 11.4 million more than The Perfect Couple (75.1 million), which also debuted in September and has a running time about two hours shorter than that of Squid Game.
Netflix says its users — it had about 302 million paid memberships in the fourth quarter of 2024 — spent 94 billion hours with the streamer from July through December, a 5 percent increase from the second half of 2023. Looking a little deeper in the data, however, reveals that a relative handful of shows drove most of that engagement time.
The streamer lists 15,663 titles — 8,680 movies and 6,883 TV programs — that gathered at least 100,000 views in the second half of last year. Only 29 percent of those titles, however, reached 1 million views or more (rounded to the nearest 100,000).
In terms of viewing hours, the top-heaviness is even more stark. The top 1 percent of titles accounted for about 22.32 billion hours of viewing, almost 24 percent of the total. The top 10 percent brought in 68 percent of all viewing — 64.16 billion hours.
That’s likely the case with other streamers too, where a relative handful of shows and movies deliver outsized engagement. It’s hard to check, however, as Netflix is the only streaming service to do wide-ranging data releases.
A few other notable takeaways from Netflix’s data trove:
Live sports is working: The heavily hyped Jake Paul-Mike Tyson boxing match and its undercard delivered 48.9 million views and 235.7 million hours of watch time after its Nov. 15 live telecast, good for seventh place among TV programs in views and 16th in total viewing time. Netflix’s two Christmas NFL games weren’t that big but still ranked in the top 80, with more than 14 million views each.
Originals rule: The top 15 TV shows and top nine films in terms of views were all Netflix originals. After Squid Game, The Perfect Couple and Monsters, season four of Emily in Paris and season one of Nobody Wants This rounded out the top five series. Carry-On — another December release — led the film slate in views, followed closely by The Union and Rebel Ridge. All three had at least 129 million views globally.
The average Netflix title is … : With the great majority of titles coming in under 1 million views, the average number of views per series or movie isn’t very high. For TV, it’s 1.41 million views — making three seasons of Grey’s Anatomy (12, 14 and 19), at 1.4 million views each, a roughly average Netflix TV show. The average movie on Netflix had 1.68 million views in the second half of 2024; films as varied as Bridget Jones’s Diary and Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice fit that bill at 1.7 million views.
The top 10 TV shows and movies on Netflix for the second half of 2024, ranked by views, are below.
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