Pictured: Crystal Onion, White Noise, and Betrayal
Welcome to your weekly roundup of the biggest stories from Netflix’s top 10 hourly figures for the week ending January 1, 2023.
Netflix updates its Top 10 Stats page weekly with 40 new figures per hour for the top movies and shows from the past seven days. If you want to easily browse the top 10 hourly data, visit our tool.
Last week Netflix also released their Top 40 list of the entire year, which we’ve rounded up here.
Note: In this report of Netflix hours watched from December 26, 2022 to January 1, 2023, we will use «Full View Equivalent» or CVE, expressed in millions. That means we divide the hours watched advertised by Netflix by the running time of the movies or series. It allows for better comparisons between movies and series, but it is not an audience metric. It is the minimum number of viewings if they were all complete from the first second to the last of the movie or season.
1. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery Goes Strong In Its Second Week – Enters Top 10 Movies Of All Time List
Image: Netflix
After his strong start last week, we were looking forward to seeing how glass onion it would perform in its second week and did very well with a total now of 90.4 million CVEs after 10 days. it’s over the gray man and now seeks to achieve The Adam Project as the most watched Netflix movie of 2022.
Glass Onion audience on Netflix vs. Red Notice, Don’t Look Up, The Adam Project and The Gray Man
Can you handle that? Well, my prediction so far is that it will end up at 125-135 million EVCs for the first 28 days due to a lack of competition. above or below The Adam Project? Place your bets!
2. White noise it makes a little noise
It’s hard for any auteur film, but Noah Baumbach’s latest installment, White noise, it did pretty well considering the source material with 6.5 million CVEs in its first three days.
When compared to other top Netflix movies released on a Friday, it debuts behind the lost daughterwhich had the same release date last year.
White Noise Netflix audience in front of The Starling, The Lost Daughter, Munich, A Jazzman’s Blues and Worth
3. Spy shows were trending during the last weeks of December 2022.
English series released on Mondays are quite rare, but we have two examples from the last two months, so we can compare them! The espionage drama Treason with Charlie Cox started with 16.2 million CVEs, a huge advantage over the 13.2 million CVEs that man indoors It started with in October.
Treason hearing in front of Inside Man, OMB S4, Fidelity and The Baby-Sitters Club
While we’re on the subject of the spy show, the recruit with Noah Centineo fell 55% in its third week (26.3 million CVEs total). That seems a bit low for his renewal, so for this one, completion rates will matter.
Four. Wednesday it’s also still going strong into its fifth week.
With all the talk about glass onion, we could have forgotten Wednesday it is still going strong and is still number 1 for the fifth week.
You just passed the 210 million CVE mark, and if you can’t hope to break squid game in the short term, his performance is still pretty out of this world (in broadcast ratings).
Wednesday Hearing CVE vs Squid Game
5. Cancellation of 1899explained by numbers.
2023 started off strong with the news of the cancellation of 1899 after its first season.
This cancellation that would be difficult to explain using just our CVE metric as the German series had one of the best launches of any new 2022 European series.
1899 in front of the audience of other Netflix original shows in 2022
Unfortunately, as we’ve said repeatedly, the CVE metric is an arbitrary construct designed to compare shows against each other, but not an estimate of actual viewership.
So those 35 million CVEs can also be represented as 60 million CVEs for the first four episodes and 10 million CVEs for the last four and we would still have an average of 35 million CVEs.
But the series’ rate of decline is presumably what prompted this decision. But how can we observe the decay rate of a series?
Some data companies like i digital provide some numbers, but I prefer to use another method, and that is public data coming from the TVTime app.
On this app, hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world record what they watch every day, episode by episode, giving us an idea of how many watch the entire season.
It’s still an imperfect point of comparison since TV Time members are avid fans of the series, but if we compare the rate of deterioration between the first and last episodes of 1899 with the other three series, here’s what we find:
1899 Completion Rate vs. Other Netflix Shows on TV Time
1899 it lost 24% of its viewers between the first and last episodes among members of TVTime. That’s a lot more than the other series, and some of that can be attributed to the fact that 1899 it is still relatively new and some people have not yet had time to finish it.
Still, if we take a look at other new series that have been renewed or canceled in 2022, a pattern seems to emerge.
1899 Completion Rate vs. Other Netflix Shows on TV Time
Not shown in the graph here is stopshearts which has a best-in-class 4.6% drop rate on TV Time.
The only thing that seems out of place here is Half Bad: The bastard son and the devil himself which was ultimately cancelled, but his CVE numbers weren’t good to begin with, so the completion numbers may not have even mattered.
Marketing and promotion is a double-edged sword when it comes to Netflix shows.
1899 has been one of the most hyped and promoted new international shows of the year by Netflix and because of that many people probably tuned in but too many of them tuned out leading to a higher rate of deterioration leading to its cancellation.
It’s also important to note that it’s highly likely that if that show had launched between 2018 and 2021, it probably would have been renewed. But we are in 2023 and the landscape is quite different for Netflix. Especially for an expensive show like 1899.