The Witcher breaks Netflix viewership records -- with a catch

The Hollywood Reporter

Netflix's fourth quarter earnings statement released this afternoon stated that The Witcher is on track to be its biggest series launch ever, with 76 million member households watching the fantasy drama -- but there's a catch. Netflix has changed what it counts as a "view." Previously, Netflix considered one view as a member account watching at least 70% of one episode. But now Netflix considers one view to be when viewers "chose to watch" as little as two minutes, or "long enough to indicate the choice was intentional." As The Hollywood Reporter notes, "the new metric is now more akin to views on a YouTube video, which indicate in most cases only a small portion of a given piece of content's running time, and are even farther away from the average audience measure for traditional TV." Netflix adds: "Our new methodology is similar to the BBC iPlayer in their rankings based on 'requests' for the title, 'most popular' articles on The New York Times, which include those who opened the articles, and YouTube view counts. This way, short and long titles are treated equally, leveling the playing field for all types of our content including interactive content, which has no fixed length." Meanwhile, Netflix said Season 2 of You was watched by 54 million within its first four weeks of release and The Crown Season 3 was watched by more than 21 million, up 40% over Season 2. ALSO: Netflix uses global Google trends to claim The Witcher is more popular worldwide than The Mandalorian, even though Disney+ is only available in a few countries.