The second-season debut of Netflix’s most popular show ever, Squid Game, yielded 619.9 million streaming hours globally and 86.5 million account views in just the last six days of 2024, Netflix said.
According to Netflix’s latest bi-annual Engagement Report, which ranks viewership for around 99% of the streaming company’s movies and shows for the second half of 2024, Squid Game: Season 2 was far and away the most watched program on Netflix for the six-month period.
Netflix said its overall viewership was up 5% YoY during that span, but that no single movie or TV show drove that result. Despite its massive debut audience, for example, the streaming company said Squid Game: S2 only accounted for 0.7% of all Netflix viewing during the July - December frame.
The Nicole Kidman-led dark dramedy series The Perfect Couple ranked second among Netflix TV shows with 75.1 million account views, followed by Ryan Murphy’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story with 69.7 million views.
Notably, all three of the aforementioned Netflix series titles garnered total viewing times of well over 300 million hours — a distinction not shared by any single Netflix film over the measured six-months span.
However, Netflix’s preferred engagement metric is “views,” which is measured by total viewing hours divided by runtime. Since the singular nature of movies typically yields a much smaller denominator of runtime, “views” for films are usually much higher than they are for TV series, even though multi-part series produce more aggregate viewing simply because they have more installments.
With that in mind, Jason Bateman-led action-drama Carry-On led all Netflix movies in the back half of 2024 with 137 million views, followed Mark Wahlberg/Halle Berry buddy comedy The Union (131 million views) and Don Johnson crime-thriller Rebel Ridge (129 million).
Also worth mentioning: Ten of Netflix’s top 25 films in the back half of 2024 were animated, led by the No. 10 overall title, Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch (67 million).
Netflix published its first Engagement Report data drop in December 2023 and now says the spreadsheet will drop regularly in conjunction with its second- and fourth-quarter earnings reports.
“Engagement (i.e. time spent) is our best proxy for member joy,” Netflix said in a statement. “When we delight our members with shows, movies and games they love, we can drive more engagement, revenue and profit. Because when people watch more, they stick around longer (retention), recommend Netflix more often (acquisition) and place a higher value on our service.”