Stop me if you've heard this. You're at a holiday gathering and a very disengaged family member starts chatting about the show. yellow stone. Soon after, a very connected family member looks on in confusion and asks what the show is or why they keep hearing about it when no one they know seems to watch it.
But maybe it's not yellow stone. Maybe be The Queen of the South, either The glory, or maybe it is Ginny and Georgia. What those three shows have in common is that they are three of the most watched shows on Netflix between January and June 2023, and if you haven't heard of them, it's probably because you're part of the growing chasm between the people on the show. talk online and the ones everyone is watching.
These new Netflix numbers come from One of the most detailed reports Netflix has ever released publicly.. It shows an approximation of how many hours a season of a show or movie has been watched, when that content was initially released, and whether that content is available globally (and therefore may have a broader international audience). You can scroll through the entire report. here —that's what I've been doing the last few days. Sometimes I would just watch to see if a show I liked was better or worse than the other 18,213 or so items on the list, other times I would laugh at the winners and losers. (I, for one, think it's hysterical that White girls has been broadcast for more hours than Better call Saul season 3.)
Mainly, I've been thinking about how different this list is from what many people would have expected. When you talk to people online, the Netflix shows they talk about are usually pretty rooted in the genre (The Wizard, Strange things) or in a very specific type of prestige television (The crown). But those programs aren't always as successful as you'd expect. The crownThe fifth season premiered in November 2022 and hit 153. Since we don't have the numbers for 2022, we can't say how low it was from launch to January 2023, but it's safe to say it was a much bigger one than Wednesdaywhich premiered around the same time and comfortably ranked in the top 10 most-watched shows on Netflix.
The WizardMeanwhile, the third season premiered on June 29 and barely managed to crack the top 550 most-watched shows. But when you compare his previous seasons to how well he Ginny and GeorgiaLast season it did, but there's no competition to show that more people were willing to catch up. Despite coming out in 2021, the first season of Ginny and Georgia was firmly in the top ten along with its new season, which premiered in January and peaked at number two overall. The WizardThe previous seasons reached 165 and 227, respectively.
All this suggests that Ginny and Georgia It's part of that whole range of things that a lot of people see but maybe don't post on Threads or use to build followers on TikTok.
And the confusion and bewilderment that I have seen Ginny and Georgia'The popularity of s reminded me of similar conversations in the '90s, where Usenet forums would explode with activity after a new episode of The x files either Buffy the Vampire Slayer then people would be surprised when Monday Night Football and IS They were at the top of the Nielsen charts published the following week. They forgot that, in reality, their vocal community is much smaller than the community of people who just watch things and don't talk about them afterwards.
And it's easy for people to have forgotten that this is how TV ratings have always worked: with shows driven by quiet audiences dominating the rankings. For years, streaming has been a black box of carefully curated numbers designed to promote the shows that streaming services want you to talk about and then subscribe to watch yourself, rather than the less talked about stuff that many people spend their time watching. days staring in silence and never arguing. It's one of the main reasons why many critics and analysts were so frustrated with the black box method. They knew this was happening, it was just hard to measure it externally when people watching shows like Ginny and Georgia they didn't immediately go to an easy-to-follow platform to talk about it.
But in the last year things have changed radically and surprising data dumps like the one Netflix shared are going to happen more frequently. First, because streaming services are now contractually obligated to share viewing metrics with the actors and writers who create their content. Unions in Hollywood scored big during the summer and fall strikes and will now have access to all the viewing figures that services like Netflix have been reluctant to share.
And second, gone are the days of 0 percent interest, where a streaming service could throw everything against the wall to see what stuck. Netflix and its competitors now rely heavily on their rapidly growing advertising businesses, which means they need fewer super-expensive shows that generate a lot of buzz (and often have big drops in viewership) and more affordable shows that appeal to those quiet viewers. and informal. who will sit through a Tide commercial to see what happens next.
And because the advertising business is quickly becoming so central to these companies, that means, again, that these numbers will start to appear more. Advertisers need real metrics to know where they should place their ads.
And I think that means that, in the coming years, the way we talk about all these streaming shows will change as well. Ginny and Georgia will probably stop being the program you had to furiously Google when you started reading this article and will start sitting in the same place in your brain as NCIS either Grey's Anatomy. And that's a good place for it to be, because we didn't know it, but it was already there to begin with.
