“Toss a coin to your Witcher, O’ valley of plenty” – the song in the series by Jaskier the bard is a hit and has garnered millions of views on YouTube. Netflix just announced its fourth-quarter earnings for 2019 and we get to see some interesting statistics, the most eye-catching concerns The Witcher series which is based on fantasy novels by Andrzej Sapkowski.
According to the streaming giants, 76 million people have watched the series so far making it the most-watched first season show ever on Netflix. The statistics are based on a 2-minutes view which the company says it’s enough to arouse anyone’s interest with intent on the hugely popular series. The is a deviation from the 70% statistics of a single episode the company has been using to measure.
“We believe that reporting households viewing a title based on 70% of a single episode of a series or of an entire film, which we have been doing, makes less sense. We are now reporting on households (accounts) that chose to watch a given title . Our new methodology is similar to the BBC iPlayer in their 1 rankings based on “requests” for the title, “most popular” articles on the New York Times which include those who opened the articles, and YouTube view counts. This way, short and long titles are treated equally, leveling the playing field for all types of our content including interactive content, which has no fixed length. The new metric is about 35% higher on average than the prior metric.”, says Netflix while trying to clarify the 2 minutes watch time.
The Witcher on Netflix is only a month old, its 76 million views so far regardless of how it’s measured is massive. Considering Netflix does not use the same strategy as HBO for Game of Thrones where episodes are dropped weekly, the statistics is even more impressive. Netflix says, The Witcher “tracking to be our biggest season one TV series ever.”
The company is already working on plans to run many seasons of the show on Netflix for years says CEO Reed Hastings who confirmed in a video interview that it’s a “massive new franchise that we’ll develop season after season”. The show has also been confirmed for a second season before its first season aired on Netflix.
The Witcher series has brought The Witcher 3 game more playtime on Twitch and Steam and it was also one of the most downloaded PlayStation games in 2019.
