Why Netflix Used The 2-Minute Rule For Tracking User Habits (And Why It Stopped)

When you look at the list of the top 10 most-watched Netflix shows, there's a lot of interesting math that goes into what counts as a view and how it affects placement on the list. It's not an exact science, but it plays a huge role in not only helping viewers discover the hottest shows but also in determining what Netflix will make more of. Netflix and other streaming services do not create programming that isn't hitting the numbers that justify further investment.

Netflix used to count your view when you watched 70% of a show or movie. It was later recognized that this metric had a downside. In a letter to shareholders released on 21 January, 2020, Netflix (via GameSpot) said the metric "makes less sense" since it had "titles with widely varying lengths–from short episodes (e.g., Special at around 15 minutes) to long films (e.g., The Highwaymen at 132 minutes)." So it moved to something it thought made more sense: the two-minute rule.

Essentially, every time you watched a movie or an episode of a TV show for two minutes, it counted as a view. Netflix believed this length counted as an intentional view and that it would put all its content on a level playing field when making its Top 10 lists. The biggest problems with this shift, however, were that it didn't accurately reflect how many people watched something in its entirety and inflated viewership numbers. Netflix abandoned the metric after heavy criticism.

At the outset, it's easy to see that this metric severely lowered the bar for what counted as a view, to the point of being misleading. For instance, if a movie has an opening credits sequence that extends past two minutes, which many movies do, that counts as a view. Scrolling social media while not paying attention to what's playing on Netflix for more than two minutes? Another view.

In the letter to shareholders, Netflix (via The Hollywood Reporter) celebrated that Ryan Reynolds' action thriller with a $150 million budget and a cameo as himself, "6 Underground," got 83 million views under this metric. It didn't mean all those people watched the movie from start to finish or even 70% of it, which would have been better. It just meant that 83 million people watched at least two minutes of it.

Furthermore, it inflated the view counts, as Netflix even admitted that the "new metric is about 35 percent higher on average than the prior metric." So the viewership under the old metric would be about 61 million for "6 Underground." This is still a huge number of people, but the new metric boosts viewership, which can sound impressive for shareholders when presented with those high figures. This makes it even more misleading because no one other than Netflix really knows how long people actually watched the content.

After Netflix received criticism for the two-minute rule, it switched the metric for its Top 10 list in November 2021 to total hours viewed over a 28-day period. The problem with this change was that it heavily favored shows that had longer run times, while still not clarifying how many people are actually watching the programming.

For instance, the fourth season of "Stranger Things," which is one of the best sci-fi shows of recent times, had longer episodes than season one of "Wednesday," with some of them being feature-length. While both shows were extremely popular, "Stranger Things" had the most hours watched between the two in the 2022 rankings. To address this, Netflix did more experimentation and came up with another tweak to its metrics in June 2023.

In a blog post, Netflix announced it will still show total hours viewed, but it will also show views alongside it. Results would be calculated by dividing the total runtime into the total hours watched (total hours viewed / total runtime), while also extending the qualifying time from 28 to 91 days. With this change, "Wednesday" beat "Stranger Things 4" in viewership, despite having half the runtime. Furthermore, this new metric makes it easier to compare the popularity of Netflix's programming with that of other streaming services. The numbers are just an average instead of the actual number of people watching, but it's significantly better than the two-minute rule.