Netflix’s Latest Data Dump Highlights Its Global Reach

From left: Emily Rudd as Nami, Iñaki Godoy as Monkey D. Luffy and Mackenyu Arata as Roronoa Zoro in ‘One Piece’

Casey Crafford/Netflix

Netflix has released another huge batch of data about the time users spent with the service, and the top of its series list demonstrates how wide its global reach is.

The No. 1 series for the second half of 2023, as measured by Netflix’s view metric (total viewing hours divided by running time), was One Piece, a U.S.-Japanese co-production based on the enduringly popular manga and anime series. It amassed 71.6 million views following its Aug. 31 premiere. Four of the next five shows — German miniseries Dear Child, the third installment of Lupin from France, and British shows Who Is Erin Carter? and Sex Education season four — originated outside the United States, and the sixth, The Witcher, is based on novels by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski and films in Europe.

One Piece’s 71.6 million views equates to 541.9 million hours of viewing worldwide in the four months from its premiere date to the end of 2023. In the United States, the show had just a four-week run in Nielsen’s streaming top 10, totaling a little more than 64 million hours of viewing in that time. That’s only about 16 percent of what Netflix said was the show’s global tally (407.9 million hours) in those same four weeks.

Korean drama King the Land and Swedish limited series A Nearly Normal Family also ranked among the top 20 shows in views, and the former also had the most total viewing hours of any show in the second half of last year with 630.2 million (its 19-hour running time was considerably longer than most Netflix shows).

Netflix’s series rankings list every season of a show separately, so no one season of Suits — which dominated the U.S. streaming rankings last summer and fall — ranks higher than 21st on the worldwide list (that’s the first one, with 26.9 million views). Taken together, however, the complete series — the final season is available in some countries, though not the U.S. — had 144.2 million views and a staggering 1.59 billion hours of total viewing time. The latter figure accounts for almost 2 percent of all viewing (90 billion hours) on Netflix from July through December 2023, just from a single series.

Sam Esmail’s thriller Leave the World Behind was the most watched movie — and the No. 1 title on Netflix, period — for the second half of 2023, despite premiering on Dec. 8. The movie, which stars Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali and Ethan Hawke, racked up 121 million views in its first 24 days and currently sits fifth among Netflix’s all-time top 10 English-language movies, as measured by views over their first 13 weeks of release.

The data dump includes almost 16,000 titles — 6,599 series and 9,395 movies — that were on Netflix from July 1-Dec. 31, 2023. As with the streamer’s first big data release in December, it includes a whole lot of titles that essentially no one watched. About 5,200 titles had between 50,000 and 149,999 views (Netflix rounds to the nearest 100,000) in the six-month period, and about half of those also had under 150,000 hours of total viewing time.