David Farnor | On 25, Jan 2020

73 million households have watched The Crown to date, according to Netflix statistics.

The streaming giant has traditionally been tight-lipped about its viewing figures, but as third party content increasingly departs the service and rivals launch their own competing platforms, Netflix has begun to divulge key statistics in a move to position itself as a popular destination for its own original content.

Indeed, this is the first time the streaming giant has revealed figures for the royal drama. Previously, BBC Director General Tony Hall hit out at Netflix’s claims of popularity, suggesting that while the Bodyguard finale on BBC One reached 17 million viewers in one month, the Beeb’s data suggested that The Crown had reached 7 million users in 17 months.

Now, Netflix is hitting back, saying that The Crown’s popularity has been growing with each season, with more than 21 million households choosing to watch Season 3 in its first four weeks, up more than 40 per cent from Season 2 over the same time period. According to Netflix, more than 73 million households worldwide have chosen to watch The Crown to date.

The figures arrive just after the drama bagged the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Ensemble in a Drama series, while Olivia Colman won the Golden
Globe for Best Actress in a Drama Series earlier this month.

“73 million households around the world have made The Crown part of the global cultural zeitgeist,” Netflix said in a letter to its shareholders.

Nonetheless, it’s not as big as some Netflix series, with 54 million households forecast to have chosen to watch You Season 2 in its first 28 days, while 40 million chose to watch Klaus in its first month, and 76 million households choosing to watch The Witcher’s first season during the same time period.

Of course, the figures from Netflix are worth taking with a pinch of salt. Where before, the streaming giant classed a “view” as someone watching 70% of a movie or a single episode of a show, it’s now changed its measurements to something that it says is more accurate.

Now, Netflix will count the number of times that an account chooses to watch a title for “at least 2 minutes”, which it deems as “long enough to indicate the choice was intentional”, as opposed to an accidental click.

“As we’ve expanded our original content, we’ve been working on how to best share content highlights that demonstrate popularity. Given that we now have titles with widely varying lengths – from short episodes (e.g. special at around 15 minutes) to long films (e.g. The Highwaymen at 132 minutes), we believe that reporting households viewing a title based on 70 per cent of a single episode of a series or of an entire film, which we have been doing, makes less sense,” explained Netflix in its letter to shareholders. “We are now reporting on households (accounts) that chose to watch a given title.”

The mythology is not dissimilar to BBC iPlayer’s measurement of “requests”, which include streams or downloads of a title, or YouTube view counts.
Conveniently, it also means that Netflix’s numbers will be much higher, about 35 per cent higher than the previous metric – 45 million households chose to watch Our Planet, using the new metric, compared with 33 million under the prior system.

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