Thrilling an Audience: In response to the Netflix engagement report

Greater transparency of viewership information in Hollywood is a long time sticking point for creators, marketers and industry stakeholders alike (just ask the WGA, SAG and the AMPTP during their recent negotiations). Netflix made steps towards increasing that visibility on Tuesday (December 12th, 2023) by releasing the “What We Watched” report, a spreadsheet with 6-months of engagement data enumerating how many cumulative hours users spent watching content across their platform. 

But there’s more to this content story as VP of Strategy and Analysis at Netflix Lauren Smith described. “While at the slate level, our goal is to maximize hours viewed… at the title level it’s a bit more nuanced. It’s all about whether a movie or TV show thrilled its audience”. But how does one measure the excitement they get from watching content? Here at Diesel Labs, we specialize in exactly that! We measure audience engagement with everything in the cultural zeitgeist. 

To illustrate the point, we’re providing that extra layer of nuance to the “What We Watched” report by pairing Netflix viewership with Diesel’s proprietary attention metrics to quantify whether or not the titles in question were impactful enough to generate audience responses. Here’s a quick look at how engagement shakes out across the top 15 English language titles from the Netflix report:

How to read: Video views include views across trailers, previews, and other promotional and teaser content. Non video engagements include likes, reactions, shares, and comments. 

The analysis period was January 1 to June 30, 2023 to match the Netflix engagement report. 

Video views include views across trailers, previews, and other promotional and teaser content while non video engagements include likes, reactions, shares, and comments from across the major social and video media platforms.

Across the top Netflix titles, “The Outer Banks” came in first for audience engagement followed by “Wednesday” and then “You”. On average, video views made up roughly ⅔ of the engagements over the six month period. “The Mother” clocks in with the highest volume of video engagement with 90.5% of all attention coming from video views while “The Diplomat” maintains the highest level of non video engagement at 73.2%.

If we rank the list based on audience attention, things look just a little bit different! Notable Netflix originals like “Never Have I Ever”, “That 90’s Show” and “XO, Kitty” float toward the top based on these engagement statistics.