Netflix is still the most successful streaming service today. Nowhere else can you watch such well-known shows such as Wednesday or Squid Game, which attract millions of viewers. But what are the most watched series on the streaming platform? In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the figures Netflix published … and the ones it hasn’t.
Further reading: The secret to saving big on streaming services: Ruthless disloyalty
What the official figures say
On the official Netflix website, you can find the most streamed series of all time. However, this overview is broken down in two ways. You’ve got the English vs. non-English productions and the different seasons.
This makes the result somewhat confusing, but also ensures that series with only a few seasons are not at a disadvantage. According to this calculation, the show Wednesday, for example, is in first place with its first and only season to date. However, many series appear several times in the list such as Bridgerton.
It’s also somewhat unfortunate that Squid Game or House of Money are excluded from the main statistics as non-English language productions, even though they’ve accumulated more views than many others. There has to be a better way to include those as well.
Netflix’s most-watched series
We wanted to find out which series had the most views on Netflix across all the released seasons. This isn’t so easy, as Netflix doesn’t publish official figures.
However, if you add up the known results of all the seasons, taking into account both English and international productions, you get the following list of the most successful and most watched Netflix series:
- Squid Game (two seasons, 417,700,000 views)
- Stranger Things (235,500,000 views for seasons three and four alone, at least 335,000,000 million views for all four seasons)
- Bridgerton (three seasons, 313,100,000 views)
- Money Heist / La casa de papel (285,200,000 views for parts three, four, and five alone, no data on parts one and two)
- Wednesday (one season, 252,100,000 views)
- Lupin (167,900,000 views for parts one and two, at least 217,600,000 views for parts one to three)
- The Witcher (three seasons, approx. 198,500,000 views)
- Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (one season, 115,600,000 views)
- Queen’s Gambit (one season, 112,800,000 views)
- The Night Agent (one season, 98,200,000 views)
The Korean series “Squid Game” is, unsurprisingly, the most-watched Netflix series ever if you add both seasons together.
Netflix
Note: Unfortunately, we were unable to find any official information from Netflix on a few series and their seasons and therefore had to rely on older reports on the success of the seasons and older versions of the Internet Archive page. However, this list is almost identical to this list of the most-watched Netflix series within the first 28 days of release and seems to us to be a relatively good estimate.
The following shows fall out of the statistics
During our research, we noticed that Netflix has not updated the figures for older seasons for some time. We assume that the actual viewing figures differ slightly, but that the popularity of the respective series has remained roughly the same.
We also assumed that shows like Sex Education and You would be quite high up in the rankings. Unfortunately, we have found few meaningful figures on this.
The new seasons were watched by around 40 million households within the first few weeks of their release. However, as both shows received four seasons each, we estimate the total number of views to be up to 160 million, which would put them somewhere between The Witcher and Dahmer in the ranking.
It was also difficult to find reports on the successes of the older seasons, especially for the international series. This is particularly unfortunate in the case of House of Money, as the Spanish production is in fourth place in the overall ranking with its more recent seasons alone. If the previously released seasons were included, it could even surpass Bridgerton.
The series Elite also enjoyed great popularity on Netflix for a long time, with almost all eight seasons repeatedly landing in the top ten. Unfortunately, apart from seasons three and four with around 50 million total views each, none of the later seasons appear in the statistics (we had to consult the Internet Archive for this). Nevertheless, the Spanish production would also have a good chance of making it into the top ten if we had data on all seasons.
Perhaps Netflix will one day publish an overall ranking of the most successful series that takes into account all productions and all seasons released. Until then, however, we will stick to our list and, if possible, update the figures accordingly.
This article originally appeared on our sister publication PC-WELT and was translated and localized from German.
