Netflix will now be slightly clearer about its viewership numbers

Well, well, well: Netflix won’t pay its writers, but it apparently has no problem paying its mathematicians (the natural enemy of writers). Or at least that’s one conclusion to draw from the new way that Netflix will be presenting its top 10 rankings, because the streaming platform will no longer be reporting straight numbers—that are still weirdly vague and not totally accurate. Instead, it will be reporting numbers that have had math done to them so they’re slightly more understandable.

This comes from Variety, which says Netflix is going to start offering “an estimated viewership” for its weekly top 10 charts, as opposed to the old model of simply saying which movies and TV shows were watched for the most minutes—a meaningless metric that pointedly didn’t account for how many people had actually watched a thing versus how many people turned it on and then turned it off right away.

This new system will use similar data, but instead of just saying a length of time, Netflix’s nerds will divide the total number of hours that something has been watched by the length of that thing, resulting in a number that more or less (it’s less) amounts to the number of people who watched the whole thing. To be clear, it does not actually mean that, but short of actually tracking individual viewers (and answering tough questions about what constitutes “finishing” a show or movie when that could change depending on each show or movie), this is about as close as we’re going to get.

And when you put this new model into action, something interesting happens: Wednesday’s debut is now the most popular TV season in Netflix history (with 252 million “views”), pulling ahead of Stranger Things’ fourth season (140 million “views), because Wednesday was half as long as Stranger Things’ fourth season—meaning that even though people spent 1.8 billion hours watching Stranger Things and only 1.7 billion hours watching Wednesday, Wednesday gets the boost because it was shorter and the math works out in its favor.

The timing of this change seems somewhat interesting as well, since the striking WGA writers have been asking for streaming services like Netflix to be less opaque about their viewership numbers. These new numbers are less opaque, even if they aren’t really any more representative of reality, but presenting the numbers this way could also incentivize Netflix to make more short seasons—because the math could say that a hit six-episode season got more “views” than a hit 10-episode season—which could translate to less work for writers (which is why the union is looking for stronger protections in its next contract). Hey, there’s a reason it’s called show business.