145 million people have watched Adolescence, making it the biggest show on Netflix so far this year.
The streaming platform has shared its latest Engagement Report, showing what its members watched between January and June.
Adolescence was only beaten by the Cameron Diaz, Jamie Foxx movie, Back in Action, which achieved 165m. The series even came ahead of Squid Game Series 2 (117m) and Series 3 (72m).
Another Northern entry on the list is Harlan Coben’s Missing You, made by Quay Street Productions. That was the fifth most watched show at 58m. Other British entrants were Black Mirror Series 7 (31m) and Dept Q (25m).
READ MORE – British shows lead the way for Netflix
In total 95bn hours were watched by Netflix subscribers over the period. That’s up marginally from the 94bn figure last year.
“[…] amidst increasing competition for TV time is more viewing moves to streaming and gets this on-demand benefit. So we’re glad to have held that normalised engagement level, but we clearly also want to increase it,” said Co-CEO, Greg Peters.
“And to that end, we’re optimistic and expect that our engagement growth in the second half of this year will be better than in the first half given our strong second half slate.”
Netflix CEO, Ted Sarandos emphasised this during an earning call, with Stranger Things, Happy Gilmore 2 and a new Knives Out film set to be released in the latter part of the year.
“Over the long term, we tend to keep growing as the other 50% of TV viewing migrates from linear to streaming. And we’ll do that by doing what we’ve always done continuously improve the service. So keep in mind, since 2020, our content amort has grown more than 50%, from under $11 billion to more than $16 billion that we expect to do this year. And for that same time period, we definitely had — we saw increased spending, but also increased engagement, increased revenue, increased profit and increased profit margin,” he added.
“It is our objective to sustain healthy revenue growth, reinvest in the business to improve on all aspects of the service. And that includes growing content spend, strengthening and expanding the entertainment offering and to drive that positive flywheel of growth by adding value to our members and all the while growing engagement revenue and profit around the world.”
More than a third of all viewing on Netflix came from non-English language titles, and 10 of the 25 most-watched series in the first half of the year were non-English.
