Top 10 Things to Know About Our Weekly Top 10

Updated June 20, 2023: We heard feedback that only providing hours viewed on our Top 10 lists was hard to contextualize, so over the last few months we started to share the views for a good number of our titles (i.e. the number of hours viewed divided by the total run time). 

This proved to be a more relatable metric for many people, so starting today, while we will continue to show hours viewed per title, our Top10 lists will now be ranked by views. We will also extend the qualifying time for our most popular lists from around one month (28 days) to three months (91 days) given that many of our shows and films grow significantly over time.   

As we have always said there is no one perfect streaming metric. But we believe that views combined with total hours viewed is a good evolution because it’s: 

• Anchored in engagement — our best measure of member satisfaction and a key driver of retention (which in turn drives our business); 

• Ensures longer titles don’t get an advantage; and 

• Enables third parties to compare the relative impact of movies and series - despite their different run times. 

Our hope is that by being consistent and transparent about what people are watching, Netflix can give everyone — consumers, creators, analysts and press — better insights into what success in streaming looks like more generally. We will continue to share more granular, title-specific data with creators, and as always, we’ll continue to listen to feedback.

Here are the Top 10 things you need to know about the methodology behind Top10.Netflix.com:

1. The lists are ranked by hours viewed per title, i.e. the total number of hours members spent watching a season of a series or film (including the three times you watched that scene in Sex Life). 

2. We measure hours viewed over the course of a week, starting on Monday and ending on Sunday with the lists being published on Tuesday. 

3. We publish four weekly global Top 10 lists: Films (English), TV (English), Films (Non-English), and TV (Non-English). For each list, we show hours viewed that week for each title.

4. We also publish two Top 10 lists, for Films and TV, for over 90 countries (the same countries with country Top 10 rows on Netflix itself). These lists are also ranked by hours viewed (though we’re not showing hours viewed for each title at the country level).

5. Each season of a series is measured separately, so you might see Seasons 2 and 3 of Stranger Things on the list. 

6. All titles, whatever the genre, are eligible for the lists — series and films, kids and family, Netflix and licensed.  

7. While we’ve launched the site today (16 November), our Top 10 Lists and information we provide about the number of weeks a title has been in the Top 10 date back to June 28, 2021.

8. We also show the Top 10 Most Popular Netflix Films (English), TV (English), Films (Non-English), and TV (Non-English) of all time, based on the total number of hours a title was viewed over its first 28 days on our service. 

9. Weekly reporting is rounded to 10,000 to account for any fluctuations in Internet connectivity around the world.  

10. We’ve engaged EY, an independent accounting firm, to review our new viewing metrics, and we will publish their report in 2022.

Updated December 2021: We discovered a bug on Top10.Netflix.com that was causing small fluctuations in some of the historical lists. We’ve now fixed the issue.