Alright, the new stats for the back half of 2024’s Netflix viewing came out this afternoon and it occurs that we somehow missed the stats for the first half of the year so I thought I’d just take a look at the stats for 2024 put together. Squid Game Season 2 topped the back half of 2024 with 619.9m hrs viewed in just the final week of the year, an effective viewership of 86.5m viewers (interestingly the first episode made Top 50 BARB in the UK, but none of the other ones did). It looks like Bridgerton Series 3 was the most watched TV show throughout the whole of last year with 907.1m hrs, an effective viewership of just shy of 112.9m viewers – effective viewership just being the amount of hours watched divided by the runtime – this doesn’t account for people who give up on a series or people who watch multiple times.
However what we’re interested in is 2024’s batch of unscripted. So let’s take a look shall we? Figures are date of release, hours, effective viewership across the year. I’ve sprinkled in some unscripted non-game stuff and of interest stuff as well for texture, but we’ll stick to English language versions of formats in the main unless a number looks particularly interesting. It’s just in date order as I work my way down the lists. Not all shows are available worldwide. Runs from 1st Jan 2024 to 31st Dec 2024.
The Trust Season 1: 10/1/24 52.2m hrs, 7.5m
Love is Blind Season 6: 14/2/24 316.3m hrs, 22.1m
Physical 100 Season 2: 19/3/24 135.0m hrs, 13.0m
Is It Cake S3: 29/3/24 70.7m hrs, 12.3m
The Circle S6: 17/4/24 53.2m hrs, 5.0m
Don’t Hate the Player/Mauvais Jouers S1: 17/4/24 13.9m hrs, 2.0m
Selling the OC S3: 3/5/24 39.1m hrs, 8.4m
The 8 Show: 17/5/24 110.0m, 15.8m
Buying London S1: 5/22/24 22.2m hrs, 5.3m
Agents of Mystery S1: 18/6/24 8.2m hrs, 1.8m
The Mole S2: 28/6/24 45.7m hrs, 5.9m
Too Hot To Handle S6: 19/7/24 101.1m hrs, 11.0m
The Influencer S1: 6/8/24 23.2m hrs, 3.1m
Love is Blind UK S1: 7/8/24, 141.8m hrs, 12.1m
KAOS: 29/8/24, 135.2m hrs, 20.3m
Outlast S2: 4/9/24, 49m hrs, 7.4m
Selling Sunset S8: 6/9/24 78.3m hrs, 12.2m
The Circle S7: 11/9/24, 39.1m hrs, 3.5m
Love is Blind S7: 2/10/24, 220.9m hrs, 14.4m
Culinary Class Wars S1: 17/9/24 227.9m hrs, 17.2m
Jake Paul vs Mike Tyson: 15/11/24 235.7m hrs, 48.9m
Zombieverse: New Blood: 19/11/24 8.9m hrs, 1.3m
Is It Cake? Holiday S1: 28/11/24 26.1m hrs, 9.7m
The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On S3: 69.7m hrs, 7.5m
The Two Christmas Gamedays (25/12/24) both did around 14.3m viewers
Phew, what do we learn from all that? Clearly the Netflix relationship/dating shows are still massively successful, somehow we’ve completely slept on Culinary Class Wars – massive numbers for that! It’s Cooking Physical 100, if we’d known that at the time we’d have watched it. Kaos, the Greek myth drama with Jeff Goldblum that we liked, got canned with 20m viewers effective. Harsh. The Mole US is low-mid tier reality successful. The Influencer and Agents of Mystery deserve more.
Looking at some previous shows we’ve enjoyed, The Devil’s Plan added another 16m taking its lifetime total up to 88.4m hours, 6.7m viewers (Series two coming soon), Squid Game: The Challenge added 45.3m to go up to 315.9m hrs to go up to a lifetime viewership of 38.7m. Streaming quiz sensation Cheat with Danny Dyer added another 0.5m hrs to go up to 8m hrs total. So there we are.
Good numbers for Mauvais Jouers and the 8 show, neither of which get a lot of attention really. CCW I vaguely knew was big at home.
Sadness for The Influencer, it’s a great show. AoM I can’t really endorse, it’s just faffy Busted.
Outlast is… probably a mild success? I hope we get more.
The other thing that jumps out is how… mid Physical 100 is. Like, it’s a success, but given the press attention it gets as the ambassador for K-unscripted… TDP is on half that (with Imo a bit of a wobbly first season).
The first series of P100 did about twice as many hours as S2 has done – closer to 300m now, which might explain some of that.
Outlast apparently recommissioned for a third series. It’s a compelling show, so pleased with that news.
Culinary Class Wars also got a second season almost immediately, though I’ve yet to hear anything about how it’s progressing.
I enjoyed it immensely, even if I thought the final fell a bit flat. You had this massive challenge gauntlet just to determine the last finalist and then the last challenge is quite literally a single dish? Meh.