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Netflix is discontinuing its biannual viewership data dump in favor of one annual report beginning in 2027.
The decision to shift away from the twice-a-year viewership data dumps comes following recent reporting that
Netflix’s original series see a major decline in viewership in their second seasons.
The latest version of Netflix’s “What We Watched” report, which covered subscribers’ viewership habits from January-June 2026, was released Thursday along with the streamer’s latest quarterly earnings results. The new report revealed “War Machine” as the most-watched film on Netflix over the first six months of the year and limited series “His & Hers” as the top TV title.
Notably missing from the report was specific viewership data for Netflix’s growing lineup of video podcasts, which were instead lumped together under “Other Shows” at the bottom of the report. Netflix said it did not break out video podcast viewership metrics this time around because the format is still new to the platform — first launched earlier this year — though internal data shows engagement is primarily through daytime viewing and mobile.
Netflix has been releasing the report twice a year, in addition to its regular weekly top 10 lists, since December 2023.
Per Netflix’s Q2 letter to shareholders, “Engagement is important to our business. But as discussed above, engagement is not just the quantity of view hours, but also refers to the quality and variety of our offering. To make this clearer, we’re making a change to our view hours disclosure.”
The note continued: “After today’s What We Watched report, which covers the first half of 2026, we will shift to publishing this report annually in the first quarter, beginning in 2027. The goal of separating the publication of the report from our earnings results is to keep the focus on our primary financial metrics – revenue and operating profit. With this change, we will still report industry-leading title-by-title and total view hours data (including our weekly Top 10 lists for movies and series in more than 90 countries).”
More to come…
