I actually know the guy who tweeted that. We sat across from each other at some kind of TV network event. A dinner, maybe? Who cares. He seemed like a decent guy. He certainly is hailed by a lot of people as a Very Serious and Important Media Reporter.
So why is he pushing out garbage non-information like this? Google Trends as any kind of indication of how large an audience for a streaming show does not even come close to passing the smell test. The relatively high proportion of people searching for “Witcher” probably stems from the pilot being a god damn confusing fucking mess. Maybe Netflix did a shit job marketing the show, making people search for whether it had been released—unlike Disney+, which plastered advertisements for The Mandalorian on every screen in existence. You don’t have to be some kind of data scientist to see the problems with this kind of claim. The last math class I took was AP Statistics 15 years ago, but I know meaningless graphs when I see them.
Is it because Vox has a deal with Netflix? Is it because this particular writer wants a deal with Netflix? Executive access? Why in god’s name would anyone tweet this fucking nonsense out?
What is it about Netflix that causes normally competent reporters to lose their news judgment?
This was right on the heels of Netflix saying that they were now going to count any viewing over 2 minutes as their view standard. So, when they say that 76 million households watched The Witcher, what they actually mean is that 76 million accounts watched 2 minutes or more of one episode of The Witcher (which has 8 episodes).
And yet everywhere I looked I’d see stories in trade publications (and a fair number of regular publications) printing Netflix’s nonsense without so much as an asterisk. Or, if there was an explanation of this view standard, it was the kind that works as a PR Jedi mind trick. Nothing to see here. Just these numbers that are totally valid. See how popular this show is? You should watch the already-very-popular-show!
So anyway I stewed about this for a few hours and made a joke to The NYT’s Jim Poniewozik about making a website that just tells you what a “view” is and then decided to really commit to the bit.