Two minutes of Squid Game

 

Hello all. 

Yes, I too saw Squid Game, and no, I'm not actually gonna talk about Squid Game. It was fine. What I'd like to delve into more is something that came up specifically related to Squid Game and that is the viewership metrics that Netflix uses (and occasionally publishes).

According to CNET and The Verge, 142 million Netflix accounts had tuned into the show in the first 28 days. To put that in perspective, Netflix has about 209 million accounts globally. That proportion is quite tremendous. Of course, there's a catch.

For one thing, this 142M figure is based on a minimum of two minutes of view-time within the 28 day period. Anything above two minutes counts as a view. "Tuning in" or "sampling" a show in this way is not quite the same thing as "watching" a show. Two minutes is not that much, right? I mean, the trailer for Squid Game is just over two minutes long. One can reasonably ask of the 142 million accounts that got past two minutes, how many stuck with it for the full nine hours of the show?

To be clear, I have no intention to dispute the popularity of Squid Game. It is obviously a phenomenal success. As it turns out, according to other metrics that Netflix has published, an estimated 87 million people have watched the whole thing, beginning to end. That's a lot, but not 142 million.

But why does this two minute metric exist in the first place? 

I think it is safe to assume that Netflix gathers a wide range of statistics and data about the use of their service in order to generate analytics that inform the decision making within the company. A metric of how many people watch a show for a single minute might be useful in some context that deals with user behaviour or "engagement" or whatever. Two minutes, 10 minutes, an hour; in some sense it's a bit arbitrary what you ultimately choose as your parameter if valuable information can be extracted from the pool of data with any one of your measuring sticks. They landed on two minutes at some point and it stuck.

The situation changes when we move from the internal workings of Netflix to the public at large. In the first place, how much incentive does Netflix have to publicise the data that it collects, when it is not under any legal obligation to do so? Logically, Netflix and all other paid streaming services like it are "compelled" to release viewership figures of their shows only if doing so serves to bolster their image and highlight their relative success. If the figures for some particular show suck, why tell anyone else? 

However, publishing data that is easy to misinterpret might pose a liability. For instance, is it misleading that the top 10 popularity charts displayed on Netflix were generated using the two minute metric? Are they intentionally tricking their viewers? In this vein, Netflix has announced that it is shifting the way it ranks its most popular titles away from the two minute metric, to increase transparency, I suppose.

What remains unaddressed is the fact that no independent entity verifies or audits these figures that streaming services like Netflix publish. The numbers are received as is, in good faith. I would not expect the service providers themselves to push for such new measures of accountability. So then. Does the public interest, or do individual consumer interests, warrant that we the public - we the consumer - demand this kind of accountability?