Netflix Boasts Transparency—the Data Tells a Different Story

At some point in our lives, all of us likely learned the art of managing expectations: In certain situations, it’s best to set the bar low so that you can easily surpass it when needed. Netflix has mastered this practice when it comes to data transparency, and on Tuesday, the company dropped its magnum opus—a collection of data so massive that you might just miss how utterly useless it actually is.

From trade publications like Deadline to conversations on Reddit, the release—titled “What We Watched: A Netflix Engagement Report”—has been dubbed a “data dump,” It’s a fitting label, given both the amount of information provided and its utter lack of organization.

The spreadsheet includes more than 18,000 titles, listed in descending order from most hours watched to least. Any title that brought in more than 50,000 viewing hours during the spreadsheet’s six-month sample, January through June of 2020, reportedly made the cut. Netflix lists seasons of its television shows separately, and although the spreadsheet notes globally available releases with a “Yes” or “No” column, the titles themselves are all mixed together. There is no way to measure viewership solely within the U.S. or another country, and the spreadsheet’s narrow time sample renders any kind of meaningful data analysis even more impossible.

Read more at The Daily Beast.