After making a big splash back in December with its first ever "Engagement Report," which ranked the audience performance of more than 18,000 titles on its platform from January - June of 2023, Netflix quietly published a similar report Thursday covering July - December of last year.
This time, total run time of a show and its "views" (total engagement hours divided by run time) are added to the rankings, with a movie or TV show's ranking determined by the latter. It's very similar to how Netflix structures its weekly Global Top 10 lists.
Netflix also separated TV shows from films in his second kitchen sink audience ranker.
On the series side, the ratings champion this time around was Manga adaptation One Piece, which debuted back in September on Netflix and quickly generated enough audience to gain a season 2 renewal.
There are a couple of interesting points about the rankings.
International programming weighed in heavily, with German limited series drama Dear Child ranking second on the list, and Korean (9% of viewing), Spanish (7%) and Japanese (5%) capturing over 20% collectively of audience share.
Perhaps most notable is Netflix's insistence on ranking its series content by season. While this is useful for gauging the audience enthusiasm for the latest campaigns, it misses when it comes to showcasing the popularity of the larger body of work.
Case in point is off-USA legal drama Suits, which was the TV buzz story, at least domestically, last summer.
Season 1 of Suits ranked only as the 20th most popular show on Netflix during the back half of 2023, with 247.7 million viewing hours and 26.9 million views. Add in Season 2's 249.4 million viewing hours and 21.7 million views, and Suits emerges as a more formidable audience draw on Netflix.
In movies, meanwhile, dystopian novel adaptation Leave the World Behind starring Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawk ranks as the fifth most popular Netflix English-language movie of all time after 91 days on the platform, with more than 339,000 hours of viewing time.
But since Leave the World Behind dropped on Dec. 8, only a fraction of that viewing is reflected in Netflix's half-year report. The film still registered enough audience in its first three weeks on the platform to rank No. 1.
Again, you can download the full report here.
