What We Watched the Second Half of 2024

Today, we released our latest Engagement Report sharing what people watched on Netflix from July to December 2024. As we announced last month, moving forward, we’ll publish our bi-annual reports alongside our second and fourth quarter earnings results.

Engagement (i.e. time spent) is our best proxy for member joy. 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. It’s why we’re leading the industry on viewing transparency, including our Top 10 Weekly and Most Popular lists.

The bi-annual Engagement Report covers ~99% of all video watch time on Netflix. The simplest way to measure engagement is by views (total hours viewed divided by runtime) as it’s a metric all streamers can replicate and highly correlates to completers on Netflix.

Success for a show or film on Netflix comes in all shapes and sizes. We have breakout hits with huge audiences and popular shows with smaller ones. But no single title — not even our most popular — accounts for more than 1% of total viewing on Netflix. For example, Squid Game S2, which had the most hours viewed in this report, accounted for only 0.7% of viewing. It’s why we invest in a wide variety of quality shows and films and why we need to make them great, so that every time a member comes to Netflix they press play and stay.

Here are some insights from the second half of 2024:

Members watched over 94B hours on Netflix in the second half of last year, a 5% increase year over year.
Despite premiering only six days before the end of the year, Squid Game S2 dominated the second half as our most-viewed series with 87M views.
Animated films continue to drive high engagement. 10 of the top 25 films in the second half of the year were animated including Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch (67M), Trolls Band Together (61M), That Christmas (60M), Sing (58M) and Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie (56M).
True crime remains a popular genre and brought in audiences for The Menendez Brothers (39M), American Murder: Laci Peterson (37M), Worst Ex Ever (26M), Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter (25M) and The Lost Children (22M).
Nearly a third of all viewing on Netflix came from non-English shows and films, with Norway’s La Palma (52M) and Mexico’s The Accident (41M) among our most-watched series in the second half. We also saw breakouts like Family Pack (41M) from France, The Empress S2 (19M) from Germany, Senna (15M) from Brazil and One Hundred Years of Solitude (9M) from Colombia.
Our South Korean, Japanese and Indian slates also had strong viewing:
- Japan: Tokyo Swindlers (12M), Drawing Closer (8M), Jujutsu Kaisen (8M)
- South Korea: Officer Black Belt (40M), Mission: Cross (23M), Love Next Door (20M), Culinary Class Wars (17M)
- India: Maharaja (25M), Do Patti (20M), IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack (12M)