Everyone loves Netflix’s lack of commercials, except for people who make commercials, probably. But apparently it has a larger benefit beyond just sparing people from the most boring part of watching TV. According to CordCutting.com (via Business Insider), Netflix saves the average user almost 160 hours every year thanks to its lack of commercials, which comes out to a little over six days that users would’ve otherwise wasted.
CordCutting.com came to this figure with some pretty basic math. Netflix has about 75 million subscribers, and those subscribers stream about 125 million hours per day. Divide the one thing by the other thing, and you have an average of 80 minutes of streaming per subscriber per day (which isn’t too unreasonable). From there, the site got Nielsen statistics that say an average hour of normal TV has a little over 15 minutes of ads, so if you combine that with the Netflix data, it comes out to something around 158.5 hours of commercials every year that the streaming service cuts out of the average user’s life. As we noted above, that comes out to more than six days, and if you continue watching Netflix at that pace and live for another 80 years or so, it’ll essentially add an entire extra year onto your life. So, if you totally misconstrue this data and draw a conclusion from it that really has no basis in scientific fact, it’s almost like Netflix is actually making you live longer.
Plus, with that extra year, you can spend an entire 365 days trying to find something to watch on Netflix before settling for Bob’s Burgers or The Office again right before you die.