Netflix’s Wednesday Becomes #1 English TV Series of All-Time

Netflix offers very little information when it comes to streaming viewership. The service reveals the streaming data for the biggest titles on its roster on a weekly basis, though it only shares that viewership in terms of how many hours an individual movie or TV season has been watched. That metric is still being released by Netflix, but the streamer has added a second measurement, one that has doesn’t really mean a whole lot but has had a major impact in the all-time Netflix rankings.

On Tuesday, Netflix announced the new “Views” metric, which is meant to examine how many individual accounts watch a particular title. Unfortunately, the numbers don’t exactly tell us that. The “Views” number is simply the total hours viewed over a certain time period, divided by the length of the movie or series. With the Top 10 rankings making that number a priority, Wednesday Season 1 has moved ahead of Stranger Things 4 as the most “viewed” TV season in Netflix history.

Stranger Things 4 has held the top spot on Netflix’s English-language TV rankings since shortly after its arrival last year. The season racked up more than 1.83 billion viewing hours in its first four weeks on the service. The first season of Wednesday was second on the list, with just over 1.71 billion hours. With the new “Views” metric, however,  Wednesday has overtaken Stranger Things 4 on the list. 

Wednesday was viewed for fewer hours than Stranger Things, but the season was significantly shorter in terms of its overall runtime. Wednesday‘s entire first season runs for less than seven hours, while Stranger Things 4 is a whopping 13 hours. 

Netflix’s new metric says that Wednesday Season 1 has 252 million views, taking its viewership total and dividing it by the overall runtime. While the math does make sense on the surface, it doesn’t line up with Netflix’s subscription total. It was reported this year that Netflix had around 232 million subscribers. Wednesday’s “views” account for 20 million more accounts than Netflix has, so it’s not the most effective way to measure the hit shows.

Another Big Netflix Change

In addition to changing the way Netflix measures success for its top shows and movies, it will also be changing the viewership window that determines its overall top 10. The previous window counted the first 28 days for any given title. The new window will measure for 91 days, allowing shows some extra time to grow after they’re released.

While the first change seems a bit confusing, extending the viewership window is nothing but good news for movies and shows on Netflix. This gives titles a lot more time to find an audience before they’re counted out.