Netflix will stop collecting viewership data twice a year and will produce a single annual report starting in 2027.
The latest version of Netflix’s “What We Watched” report, covering subscriber viewing trends from January to June 2026, was released Thursday along with the streamer’s latest quarterly results. A new report reveals that the most-watched movie on Netflix in the first six months of this year was ‘War Machine,’ while the top TV title was the limited series ‘His & Hers.’
The decision to move away from twice-a-year viewership data dumps was made in the wake of a recent report from Bloomberg that viewership was down significantly for the second season of Netflix’s original series. However, Netflix executives rejected that story on Thursday.
“Overall, we don’t see a significant change in viewership for Season 2 compared to Season 1,” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said during the company’s latest earnings call. “Our second season is performing well within our expectations. We often see a dip from Season 1 to Season 2, and even more so because, as is common in the industry, we launch shows on a very large scale. Our global reach, discovery mechanisms, and Our shows tend to start very large because this allows us to find a very large audience early, whereas in most other places our shows start quite small and sometimes grow from there.”
Sarandos continued, “If you look at the entire portfolio, all regions, all content categories, the Season 2 drop is actually a slight improvement this year compared to last year. Of course, you can pick any five data points and tell any story you like, but again, the Season 2 drop is actually a slight improvement this year compared to last year, so there is no change to our release strategy.”
Notably missing from the latest “What We Watched” report was specific viewership data for Netflix’s lineup of video podcasts, which were instead grouped together under “More Shows” at the bottom of the report. Netflix did not elaborate on viewership metrics for video podcasts since the format is still new to the platform (first launched earlier this year), but said the company sees encouraging internal data showing engagement is primarily driven by daytime viewing and mobile. In the first half of 2026, Netflix members streamed 757 million hours of “More Shows.”
Netflix has been publishing this report twice a year since December 2023, in addition to its regular weekly Top 10 list.
According to Netflix’s second-quarter letter to shareholders, “Engagement is important to our business. But as explained above, engagement refers not only to the amount of hours watched, but also to the quality and variety of our service. To make this more clear, we are changing our disclosure of hours watched.”
“After today’s ‘What We Saw’ report covering the first half of 2026, we will move to publishing this report in the first quarter of each year starting in 2027. The purpose of separating the publication of this report from revenue results is to maintain a focus on our key financial metrics, revenue and operating income. With this change, we will continue to report industry-leading per-title and total viewing time data (including weekly top 10 lists of movies and series).” in over 90 countries).
