Have you ever heard about Netflix Squid Game?
The news comes days after the company said the South Korean series became its biggest series launch ever, topping 111 million viewers globally since its Sept. 17 releases. Squid Game beat out ” “Bridgerton,” which reached about 82 million households within its first 28 days on the platform.” In addition, “Squid Game” reportedly cost Netflix just $21.4 million to produce.
Bloomberg said the figures show 132 million people watched at least two minutes of the series during the 23 days after it launched. Netflix reportedly estimates that 89% of people who started the show watched at least one episode.
Netflix Squid Game is going to boom the market.
According to figures seen by Bloomberg, Netflix estimates that its latest megahit, “Squid Game,” will create almost $900 million in value for the company, underscoring the windfall that one megahit can generate in the streaming era.
Netflix differs from movie studios and TV networks. Instead of using its catalog and a steady drumbeat of new releases, it doesn’t generate sales based on specific titles to entice customers every week. But the company does have a wealth of data concerning what its customers watch, which the company uses to determine the value derived from individual programs.
“Squid Game” stands out both for its popularity and its relatively low cost. The South Korean show, about indebted people in a deadly contest for a cash prize, generated $891.1 million in impact value, a metric the company uses to assess the performance from individual shows. In addition, the show cost just $21.4 million to produce — about $2.4 million an episode. Those figures are just for the first season and stem from a document detailing Netflix’s performance metrics for the show.
The document underscores just how successful this one show has been for Netflix and offers the most precise picture yet as to how the world’s most popular online TV network judges the success of its programming. Netflix has released self-selected viewership metrics for a handful of TV shows and movies, but it doesn’t share its more detailed metrics with the press, investors, or even the programs’ creators. As a result, guessing the popularity of a given show has become something of a parlor game in Hollywood, even as Netflix has begun to release data in dribs and drabs.
Read Netflix is going to launch all big games this year.
An attorney representing Netflix said in a letter to Bloomberg that it would be inappropriate for Bloomberg to disclose the confidential data contained in the documents that Bloomberg had reviewed. “Netflix does not discuss these metrics outside the company and takes significant steps to protect them from disclosure,” the attorney said.
Some of the figures are self-explanatory and mirror data that Netflix and other services already report. For example, about 132 million people have watched at least two minutes of “Squid Game” in the show’s first 23 days, smashing the Netflix record set by “Bridgerton.” The two-minute figure is the one Netflix releases to the public for some shows. The company said 111 million people had started the show earlier this month, but that was based on older data.
While Netflix has disclosed the number of people who start a show, it has yet to reveal how many people stuck around to watch more (stickiness) or how many people finished the series (completion rate). In addition, linear TV networks report the average number of people who watch a program for its duration, making the Netflix two-minute numbers look inflated by comparison.
In the case of “Squid Game,” Netflix estimates that 89 percent of people who started the show watched at least 75 minutes (more than one episode), and 66 percent of viewers, or 87 million people, have finished the series in the first 23 days. All told, people have spent more than 1.4 billion hours watching the show, which closely held Siren Pictures produced.
The viewership details are likely to cheer investors, who have regained enthusiasm for Netflix after several bumpy months, partly because “Squid Game” has been widespread. However, in the first half of the year, the company reported its slowest pace of subscriber additions since 2013 and blamed the lack of new hit shows for some of its struggles. It also accused the coronavirus of slowing TV and movie production. As a result, its stock has declined for much of the year and trailed the market.
But shares in the company have climbed nearly 7 percent since the release of “Squid Game” on Sept. 17, valuing the company at $278.1 billion. Even investors critical of the company expect it will either lift its performance in the third quarter or its forecast for the fourth quarter – if not both.
The Bottom Line
The news comes days after the company said the South Korean series became its biggest series launch ever, topping 111 million viewers globally since its Sept. 17 release. Squid Game beat out “Bridgerton,” which reached about 82 million households within its first 28 days on the platform. In addition, “Squid Game” reportedly cost Netflix just $21.4 million to produce.
Bloomberg said the figures show 132 million people watched at least two minutes of the series during the 23 days after it launched. Netflix reportedly estimates that 89% of people who started the show watched at least one episode.
“Squid Game” is a gory dystopian series that follows fictional contestants as they compete in a series of children’s games in the hopes of winning money and pay off mounting debt. Contestants are killed if they lose a game.
Earlier this month, a South Korean internet provider sued Netflix after it claimed the popularity of the series led to a surge in network traffic.
In recent years, Netflix has bet big on international growth, investing in foreign-language shows like “Money Heist.” The company said earlier this year it plans to spend $500 million to develop content in South Korea, where paid subscribers topped 3.8 million at the end of last year.
