Six Quick Takeaways from the Latest Netflix Data Dump
Netflix unceremoniously dumped their next half year of content performance data last week and it was all my fault. I had been speaking with a colleague that morning about putting together a concerted crunch and insight extraction for this next batch of numbers, proclaiming “yeah, I think we probably have 4 – 6 weeks to get organized”… Netflix obviously overheard, and then dropped to spite me. The period they’re looking at this time is July to December 2023.
Certain factors will remain true in these dumps, as unpacked last time. Among the nearly 16,000 lines of data dropped, the spread of “engagement” is very top heavy. The top 1,000 titles across TV and film respectively account for nearly 70% of all engagement. Global vs. Non-Global considerations and territory footprint (particularly US) also stay key when comparing content metrics.
That being said, there have been some pretty seismic changes in the dataset itself this time around. They’ve split out TV and film, great! But to my annoyance, the ranking order changed from hours viewed to “views.” By way of illustration, see below how this changes the Top 20:
Again, I brought this on myself. In the last drop I celebrated the fact that the ranking was the other way around. “Views” are not views at all, you see. They’re a mathing of hours viewed divided by duration. On the plus side, this does help level the playing field across content types with different durations (see above). On the minus, it doesn’t account for true unique reach—a very central metric when you’re building a kids brand. This approach also fundamentally ignores the repeat watching that happens with younger audiences. For the purposes of discussing “views” according to Netflix in this analysis I’ll refer to this as “weighted views.”
Oh well, now that the standard data gripes are dealt with, let’s get on with seeing what insights we can glean from this newest treasure trove of data. This is the quick and dirty version. I’m looking to work up something more glorious and in-depth. If your company is interested in accessing this, please drop me a line.
1. Kids content is an important part of the mix!
Fanfared by Netflix themselves, no less. The press release that accompanied the data highlighted that kids and family content represents 15% of all viewing. Deadline followed this up with analysis showing that animated titles accounted for 33 out of the top 100.
2. Kids movies are particularly key
Building on what was outlined by Deadline, and echoing something I’ve been banging on about for ages, kids movies in particular are huge engagement drivers for Netflix. Streaming is the datafication of the DVD player: we can now see how often beloved kids films were/are played. Global Netflix Originals that launched this period, including The Monkey King, Nimona, and the Miraculous movie, saw great performance. In particular, those dropped closer to Christmas really hit it out of the park: sequel Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, Family Switch starring Jennifer Garner, and Leo starring Adam Sandler, which deserves an entire bullet point of its own.
3. On that note, Leo was a monstrous hit
Animated musical comedy Leo launched in the lead-up to the holiday season on November 21st. It was confirmed by Netflix at the time as being the biggest debut to date for an animated film. Racking up over 171 million hours of engagement in that short five weeks before the year ended. This placed it at #3 in this overall Netflix ranking across film and TV in terms of weighted views for the period—quite an achievement!
4. The decay rate of content performance is going to make it really tricky to glean insights from this six-monthly dump of data
One other thing about Leo’s stellar performance is that it secured the movie a slot in Netflix’s weekly Top 10 ratings list for a whopping 10 weeks in a row. Performance netted out per below and, as expected, the movie saw its biggest engagement in Week 1 before organically softening out.
This decay rate is fairly typical for streaming content. On the series side you see pulses where subsequent seasons drop. It will make it decidedly difficult for us to scalpel the six-month data dumps into apples and apples for content performance, as tracking back from the total to any major pulse at content launch will be dicey. There’s some hope when it’s supplemented with weekly Top 10 data.
5. Big preschool franchises all saw decline
The top five preschool franchises declined, comparing data from the first half of the year (H1) to the second (H2). CoComelon dropped two new seasons of its original “show,” which is basically a compilation of its YouTube-style content in H1. H2 saw the launch of the new CoComelon narrative series, CoComelon Lane, in November, which was the biggest overall kids series to launch in this period. Cumulative numbers driven by the franchise are still monstrous, but this decline could be another potential indicator of saturation.
Gabby’s Dollhouse launched new seasons in both H1 and H2, and continues to drop more into 2024. It was recently announced that Gabby is going to the movies, with a theatrical release for the franchise in the works for 2025.
CoComelon’s stablemate at Moonbug Entertainment, Little Angel, also saw some softening despite launching a new season in July 2023. The head scratcher on this is that there’s been no more new content since that drop—strange for Moonbug to step away when the performance is so good. At one stage it seemed that Little Angel was a successor to CoComelon, as CoComelon had been a successor to Little Baby Bum.
My understanding on PAW Patrol and Peppa is that they are both achieving the above engagement without being windowed on Netflix US (which accounts for around 28% of all global users). Peppa finally did launch there in January 2024 so we can expect her figure in the next drop to be way up.
6. Shows with true teen appeal remain key for Netflix
We spoke last time about how teen series like Ginny & Georgia, Wednesday, Stranger Things, Sweet Tooth, and XO, Kitty were pulling in huge engagement numbers for the streamer. This time around it’s anime adaptation ONE PIECE that is leading the way.
We recently discussed teens on the Kids Media Club podcast with Sam Clough who heads up insights at SuperAwesome. She mentioned that this audience are getting a bit jaded of making the investment in new series on streaming, as there has been a lot of disillusion with cancellations (I’m looking at you, Shadow and Bone/Lockwood & Co.). This is giving rise to more consumption of comfort TV, which is visible in series like Suits notoriously blowing up in terms of engagement.
There you are, six quick takeaways from the latest Netflix data dump. And here’s one more for luck: the last thing we know from this exercise is that Netflix are serious about dropping this data every six months. Despite the challenges with wrangling meaningful context, the picture is sure to build. Tracking trends like declines in preschool will tell us more about the overall momentum, in streaming and on Netflix. And it should provide actionable data points to inform decisions about commissioning, development, and content strategy going forward. All of which I’m fully here for.