If you’ve heard this one before, stop me. During a holiday get-together, some distant relatives strike up a conversation about the television series Yellowstone. Not too long later, a family member who spends a lot of time online looks up, perplexed, and asks what the show is about or why they keep hearing about it while nobody they know seems to watch it.
However, it might not be Yellowstone. Perhaps it’s The Glory or La Reina Del Sur, or perhaps it’s Ginny and Georgia. All three of those shows have one thing in common: they were the top three series on Netflix from January to June 2023. If you haven’t heard of any of them, you’re likely one of those people who thinks there’s a growing gap between what people talk about online and what people watch.
These latest Netflix stats are derived from one of the most thorough studies Netflix has ever made available to the public. It displays the approximate number of hours watched in a season of a television program or movie, the original release date of the material, and whether or not it is accessible worldwide (and so may have a larger international audience). I’ve been scrolling through the entire report for the past two days; you can do the same here. At times, I was amused by the winners and losers; at other times, I was merely checking to see if a show I liked was better or worse than the about 18,213 other pieces of entertainment on the list. (I find it hilarious that White Chicks has received more stream time than season three of Better Call Saul.)
Mostly, I’ve been reflecting on how this list deviates from what a lot of people would have anticipated. When you converse with individuals on the internet, the Netflix series they are discussing are typically heavily influenced by either a particular genre (The Witcher, Stranger Things) or a particular type of prestige television (The Crown). However, the longevity of those series isn’t always what you’d think. November 2022 saw the launch of The Crown’s fifth season, which debuted at number 153. We can’t determine how much of a decline it saw from release to January 2023 because we don’t have the figures for 2022, but it’s safe to assume it was a far bigger one than Wednesday, which debuted around the same time and was consistently in the top 10 most-viewed Netflix series.
On June 29, however, the third season of The Witcher debuted and just avoided placing among the top 550 most watched television series. However, when contrasting its past seasons with Ginny and Georgia’s previous season’s performance, there’s no denying that more people were eager to make up ground. Ginny & Georgia’s first season, which debuted in January and came in at number two overall, was firmly in the top 10 despite having been released in 2021. The Witcher’s prior seasons scored 165 and 227, in that order.
All of this points to Ginny and Georgia as being a part of that vast array of content that a lot of people watch but might not discuss in threads or utilize to grow their TikTok following.
And the bewilderment and confusion surrounding Ginny & Georgia’s popularity brought back memories of similar discussions I had in the 1990s, when Usenet boards would blow up with activity following a new episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or The X-Files, and people would be shocked to see that Monday Night Football and ER were topping the Nielsen charts the following week. They failed to realize that the group of people who view content without really thinking about it afterwards is actually far smaller than their highly vocal community.
It’s also simple for people to forget that TV ratings have traditionally operated in this manner, with programs that draw in small viewers consistently topping the charts. For a long time, streaming has been a closed system of carefully chosen content meant to draw attention to the shows that users are encouraged to discuss and watch on their own subscription services, rather than the less interesting content that most people watch in silence and never talk about. It’s one of the main causes of the black box method’s widespread criticism and frustration among analysts. They were aware that this was taking place, but it was difficult to quantify from the outside as viewers of shows like Ginny and Georgia weren’t immediately swarming to a platform that allowed for easy tracking to discuss it.
However, over the past year, things have drastically shifted, and unexpected data dumps like the one Netflix released will become more frequent. First, the actors and writers who create the content now have contractual obligations to disclose watching numbers with streaming platforms. Hollywood labor unions made significant gains during the summer and fall strikes, and they will now get access to all the viewership data that Netflix and other providers have been hesitant to disclose.
Secondly, the days of a streaming service throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks have passed. Now that Netflix and its rivals are heavily reliant on their quickly expanding advertising revenue, they require fewer extravagant series that generate a lot of buzz but frequently see sharp declines in viewership in favor of more reasonably priced series that draw in the quiet, indolent audience that will watch through a Tide commercial to find out what happens next.
Additionally, since the advertising industry quickly becomes so important to these businesses, there will be an increase in the frequency of these figures. To determine the best places for their adverts, advertisers require accurate metrics.
And I believe it means that in the years to come, there will be a change in the way we discuss all of these streaming shows. After reading this post, Ginny & Georgia will most likely no longer be the show you had to frantically Google and instead take up residence in your mind alongside NCIS or Grey’s Anatomy. And it’s in a good spot because, although we were unaware of it at first, it was always there.
