Netflix’s first data dump explains why it’s spending $17B next year

We are collectively pouring millions of years of attention into Netflix.

The Los Gatos-based streaming giant published its first-ever Engagement Report on Tuesday, sharing the time subscribers spent watching the service’s top 18,214 titles from January to June. In a news release, Netflix said the data from the six-month span speaks for almost all of the its global viewership — a whopping 93 billion total hours.

The data shows how reliant Netflix is on new content, even with its giant catalog of older titles. The company’s data breaks up shows by season. Of the 40 most-watched movies and show seasons, just two had debuted before November 2022, and both were earlier seasons of Netflix originals that released new episodes in 2023. 

After spending an estimated $13 billion acquiring and producing shows and movies in 2023, less than planned due to the writers and actors strikes, Netflix plans to bump its spending on content up to about $17 billion in 2024, the company wrote in an October letter to shareholders.

From January to June, subscribers viewed 100 million hours of dozens of titles, but “The Night Agent,” the first season of a series starring Gabriel Basso as a low-level FBI agent, was the runaway favorite. The 10-episode action thriller pulled in 812 million hours of watch time between its release in March and the data’s June 30 cutoff.

Original Netflix releases rounded out the top five: “Ginny & Georgia” Season 2, “The Glory” Season 1, “Wednesday” Season 1, and “Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story.”

The top charts also included San Francisco comic Ali Wong’s show “Beef” (221 million hours watched), Chris Hemsworth’s “Extraction 2” (201 million hours) and multiple Korean series, including “Mr. Queen,” “Bloodhounds” and “Alchemy of Souls,” each with more than 140 million hours of view time in the period. Content made in a different language than English counted for 30% of the hours watched, according to Netflix’s press release.

Older shows boosted by TikTok (such as “Suits”) or staying power (like “Gilmore Girls” and “Breaking Bad”) also found remarkably large audiences. Seasons 1 through 7 of “Gilmore Girls,” which finished in 2007, each notched more than 55 million hours viewed.

“Success on Netflix comes in all shapes and sizes, and is not determined by hours viewed alone,” the Tuesday news release said. “We have enormously successful movies and TV shows with both lower and higher hours viewed. It’s all about whether a movie or TV show thrilled its audience — and the size of that audience relative to the economics of the title.”

A summary of the Writers Guild of America’s agreement with studios — signed in October after a five-month strike — included a clause requiring that companies provide the union with such viewer data for “self-produced high budget streaming programs,” like Netflix’s original series. The company will release the six-month data set twice a year, according to the news release.

Hear of anything happening at Netflix or another tech company? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at [email protected] or on Signal at 628-204-5452.