Netflix Finally Shared Its Streaming Stats and You Won’t Believe 2023’s Most-Streamed Show
AP Photo/Richard Drew, File
After 2023 saw entertainment workers go on strike to protest more transparency from streaming companies, one of the biggest streamers took a big step and revealed its numbers. On Tuesday, Netflix released “an exhaustive list,” according to The Hollywood Reporter, of its viewership numbers from the first half of the year.
And the most-watched show with 812.1 million hours viewed: The Night Agent.
The Netflix original, a one-hour conspiracy thriller series, premiered in March 2023, and it wasn’t the only original series from the streamer to rake in top viewership. The second season of Netflix comedy series Ginny & Georgia was the second-most viewed show with 665.1 million hours viewed, with Korean drama series The Glory coming in third with 622.8 million views. Netflix’s Wednesday series, which was released in November 2022, was the fourth-most watched show with 507.7 million hours viewed.
But the biggest story is that the information was shared at all. One of the biggest fights in both the writers’ strike and actors’ strikes was over the refusal of streaming companies to release their viewership numbers. In the past, actors and writers would receive residuals every time a show they worked on was shown on television as a rerun. With the advent of streaming-only shows, to say nothing of TV broadcast shows that were also available on streaming services, those numbers didn’t exist — but everyone knew how much people binged streaming shows for hours. That never translated to royalties for the actors or writers, but the production companies were raking in record profits. Transparency over viewership became a major bargaining point in their new contracts.
Netflix finally revealed that not only are viewers tuning in for reruns, they’re tuning in at a higher rate than they did for the occasional broadcast rerun. It’s a big step made as a result of those negotiations — so who will show their hand next?
