Netflix recently released the viewing time of 18,214 movies and TV series from January to June 2023, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The movies and TV shows on the list garnered at least 50,000 viewing hours over six months. That's approximately 99% of all viewership on the streaming platform. The data was presented to journalists on Tuesday by Lauren Smith, Netflix's VP of strategy and analysis. This is the first time this exhaustive data that Netflix or any other streaming platform has ever declared.

Netflix 2023: Who's on top?

One of the biggest winners was The Night Agent. For the first half of 2023, it tallied 812.1 million viewing hours. Ginny & Georgia's season two came in second at 665.1 million hours. Next came the Korean drama The Glory at 622.8 million hours. Wednesday, despite having been released in November 2022, came in at fourth place with 507.7 million hours.

Netflix uses total hours viewed in the report it released to track user engagement instead of the view formula it uses when it posts its weekly top 10 lists. The view formula means the total viewing hours divided by the show's run time.

Smith said that while the streaming platforms' original series and movies are consistently on the top lists, licensed titles are often present as well. Approximately 55% of the viewing hours was for original programming and 45% was for licensed content.

Suits, which was on top of the Nielsen U.S. charts for both summer and fall, garnered 599 million hours across its nine seasons worldwide on Netflix. Season one was the highest ranked, at 67 on the charts with 129.1 million hours.

Transparency in numbers

However, 3,813 or 20% of Netflix programming had few viewing hours. The company said in total these titles had 100,000 viewing hours, rounded up, but in reality fall between 50,000 and 149,999 hours. These numbers are merely a drop in the bucket compared to the over 100 billion viewing hours for the six months measured.

Ted Sarandos, Netflix co-CEO, stated that the company is on track to being more transparent with its numbers. Earlier he said that it wasn't in the company's best interest to be transparent because they didn't want their competitors to know their ratings. He also added that creators preferred this as well because of the lack of pressure when it comes to performing for ratings.