When Netflix provides viewing figures for its greatest hits, there is a common complaint: instead of offering statistics that clearly reflect the performance of the most watched, They only give one figure: the number of users who have watched a series or movie for at least two minutes.
It is information that, although it may be representative, basically it offers little information, because for example a pilot episode can go viral but the rest of the series is boring. It does not seem that with ‘The Squid Game’ we are facing such a case, but Bloomberg has accessed its internal numbers, and it is worth comparing them with the official figures.
66% of viewers have finished ‘The Squid Game’ in its first 23 days
The official number of people who had seen ‘The Squid Game’ after its first 17 days was given by Netflix: 111 million viewings. However, as we said, that figure has to do with the accounts that have seen at least two minutes.
The numbers accessed by Bloomberg show 132 million views with at least two minutes in its first 23 days. Of all of them, only 66% have completed the series in that period, which represents 87 million. A metric that by itself does not say much, but compared to other series it is the number of hours viewed in total. The Korean series has been viewed 1.4 billion hours in 23 days, for 25 million hours of ‘The Bridgertons’ in 28 days.
The value of ‘The Squid Game’ has multiplied its production cost by 41
Beyond these figures, the most important thing for Netflix is that having cost the series “only” $ 21.4 million, the internally estimated value of its impact amounts to $ 891.1 million. This, according to the internal efficiency metric, represents a ratio of 41.7. A very successful investment.
Netflix doesn’t have a ‘Game of Thrones’, but maybe it doesn’t need one either
As it happened with ‘Lost’ in the first decade of the century, or recently with ‘Game of Thrones’, having in a catalog a series that thus builds loyalty in the local market and worldwide is probably one of the great obsessions of producers and of streaming services, as in the podcasting in Spanish it was to achieve something like ‘Serial’.
Netflix has great franchises, and some seek to be as relevant as HBO, but none have managed to leave so much ground. Nevertheless, it is possible that achieving something like this with the Netflix marathon publishing model is neither possible nor necessary, having the financial muscle that you have.
Instead of a subscription of a couple of months with a giant content like ‘GoT’, Netflix gives arguments to be on the platform week by week
Netflix has a very high release rate when it comes to original content, and You benefit greatly from your series being one of the most talked about topics on social media and in person for two to three weeks after it is posted.
You do not need a ‘Game of Thrones’ that is the real dominator for two months if once every little time you can make much cheaper series like ‘The Squid Game’ or ‘La Casa de Papel’, and to a lesser extent (by cost) ‘The Bridgerton’ are the subject ‘that everyone talks about’. You do not depend so much on a mega series to succeed, but on launching content like hotcakes, of which certain titles that triumph for a few weeks.