FX Head Says Netflix’s ‘YOU’ Viewership Claim Is “Not Remotely Accurate”

Remember when Netflix claimed that 40 million people watch YOU on its platform? FX CEO John Landgraf thinks we need to be more skeptical of that number. At the Television Critics Association’s 2019 winter tour, Landgraf called out the streaming giant for reporting misleading viewership numbers in an attempt to reword its successes.

“The lines of demarcation that have been crystal clear for decades are now blurring, and over the next decade I suspect an enduring new structure will emerge with only a handful of brands and streaming services dominating scripted series,” Landgraf said toward the end of his executive session. “And finally speaking of blurry lines, recently Netflix has begun to selectively release some viewership numbers for a few of its original programs. The source of those numbers — Netflix.”

Recently, Netflix announced that a reported 40 million subscribers watched YOU within its first four weeks on the service. Originally a Lifetime show, YOU‘s rise in popularity spoke to Netflix’s power over viewers. But according to Landgraf, that huge number was misleading and represents a major problem because of Netflix’s tendency to only share selective ratings.

“If you dig a little deeper, Netflix is not telling the whole story because the numbers they issued do not follow the universally understood television metric, the one that you and prior generations of reporters have been using their whole careers, which is average audience,” Landgraf said. Netflix revealed that each one of its “views” counted if someone watched more than 70 percent of an episode. Landgraf argued that this metric “is not a remotely accurate representation of a longform program’s performance.”

“Using the traditional measurement of average audience, which is calculated by adding up every minute viewed of an episode or season and dividing it by the duration of the program, the first season of YOU on Netflix actually averaged in its first four weeks one-fifth of what Netflix’s number implies — that’s in the U.S. — or about 8 million average U.S. viewers per episode,” Landgraf said. This number comes from Nielsen’s subscription video on demand content ratings service.

“An average audience of 8 million viewers is good. But it’s not an average audience of 40 million total audience members, which would make YOU the No. 1 show on American television,” he said.

Landgraf also called out Netflix for reporting similar numbers for Sex Education. According to the same Nielsen projection, the British comedy averaged roughly 3 million average U.S. viewers per episode over over three weeks.

“When you take hundreds of at bats you’re going to get some singles, some doubles, and even the occasional home run, and Stranger Things is absolutely a home run. But it’s also a huge outlier on the Netflix platform, just as Game of Thrones is on HBO and The Walking Dead is on AMC,” he said. “The flip side of taking hundreds of at bats is that you’re going to get a massive number of strikeouts. So naturally, Netflix has also made and launched a multitude of consumer failures, but by rewording their singles so that they’re home runs and failing to ever report a single strikeout they undercut an accurate representation of their batting average and misrepresent the number and scale of their hits.”

He then pointed out that Nielsen will be continuing to monitor Netflix’s ratings as well as Amazon’s. “One way or another the truth will ultimately come out, as it always does.”

When asked why he spent his executive session focusing on Netflix’s reported numbers, he noted the dangers of Silicon Valley’s selective approach to data as it affects the TV industry as a whole. “It’s not a good thing for society when one entity or one person gets to unilaterally make the rules or pronounce the truth,” Landgraf said. “I just genuinely believe that the rules should be made as a common good by everyone, that they have to be negotiated, and I’d say leaving Netflix aside Silicon Valley’s attitude just really, really bothers me.”

And it seems that there’s a good professional reason why this would bother the CEO. In the same session, FX announced which networks most often appeared on critics’ best of 2018 lists. Out of FX’s 14 eligible scripted shows, 13 appeared on a best of the year list. By comparison, HBO had 20 of its eligible 70 shows appear in that same capacity, and Netflix had 62 of its 530 shows.

The year may change, but it seems FX and Netflix’s television war between quality vs. quantity is only starting.

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