Netflix created a new website Tuesday that measures its most-viewed films and series by the number of hours users spend watching them, showing that users are watching more Netflix than you would expect.
Every Tuesday Netflix will update the site "Top10 Netflix" with the top 10 movies and series currently on the streaming service.
According to the streaming service's new metric website, "Red Notice," a film by Rawson Marshall Thurber starring Ryan Reynolds, Gal Gadot and Dwayne Johnson has been watched for 148.7 million hours since it was released on the streaming service November 12.
In the last week, the most popular series played was season three of "Narcos: Mexico," with 50.3 million viewing hours.
Netflix's most-watched show or film, the first season of "Squid Game", has been viewed for 1.6 billion hours on Netflix.
Netflix's new website doesn't show how many people actually watched something on the service, and it doesn't include films or series that fall below its top 10. However, the new website is the most transparent measurement embraced by Netflix so far.
For more reporting from the Associated Press, see below.
Until now, Netflix has been selective in sharing viewership data. It has occasionally shared views for hits, and it logs a top 10 list, without data, on the service itself.
The hours-viewed metric replaces Netflix's previous "views," which could count just a few minutes of a movie or series. Other major streaming services, like Amazon Prime Video and Disney+, don't regularly release viewership data.
"This is an important step forward for Netflix, the creators we work with and our members," Pablo Perez De Rosso, a vice president for content strategy at Netflix, wrote in a blog post Tuesday. "People want to understand what success means in a streaming world, and these lists offer the clearest answer to that question in our industry."
Netflix will publish both English and non-English rankings, and top 10 lists for more than 90 countries. The company said that it has hired the accounting firm EY to audit its figures.
At its current rate, "Red Notice"—which received largely poor reviews from critics—could become Netflix's most popular film ever. That title currently is held by the 2018 Sandra Bullock thriller "Bird Box," with 282 million hours viewed.
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