Netflix says Queen’s Gambit is its most watched limited series

Netflix’s success in chess, The queen’s gambit, is the service’s most-watched limited series, the company said on Monday. Based on Netflix’s own yardstick for measuring popularity (see below …), The queen’s gambit was watched by 62 million households in its first four weeks of airing. A limited series is a show that usually only has one season.

By comparison, that’s almost as much as The Irishman, Netflix’s $ 159 million mafia epic directed by Martin Scorsese, and Tiger King, his viral docuseries this spring.

Netflix attributed the sensation around the queen’s game to other viral chess trends, according to Peter Friedlander, vice president of the Netflix original series, in a blog post. The novel that forms the basis of the series is on the New York Times bestseller list 37 years after its release; Google searches for chess have doubled and searches for “how to play chess” have reached a nine-year high; interest in chess games on eBay increased by 250%, and Goliath Games said its chess sales increased by more than 170%; and the number of new players on chess.com has increased fivefold.

For years, Netflix was notoriously low-key about viewership. The creator of Card castle, who put Netflix’s original content efforts on the map, once said the company wouldn’t even share audience metrics with him. But last year, Netflix relaxed its almost absolute silence on the popularity of its shows and movies to help recruit talent and fuel the buzz.

Netflix popularity numbers require disclaimers. On the one hand, they are not independently verified nor are they backed up by detailed company data. Netflix is ​​in the unique position of being able to select highlights, and we don’t have a lot of independent data to verify them. Traditional media companies, on the other hand, have their box office performance monitored independently and are at the mercy of Nielsen’s ratings as a barometer of TV shows.

Speaking of Nielsen: Don’t compare Netflix’s numbers to metrics like Nielsen’s ratings or box office numbers. It’s tempting to compare the number of people who watched a Netflix show versus a regular TV show, or estimate how much money a great movie on Netflix would have made at the box office. But these measures are not even comparable because the methods behind them differ enormously.

And at the start of this year, Netflix switched to a new audience metric. Netflix now counts a title as “watched” if you choose to watch it and let it play for only two minutes. With some shows or movies, you can turn them off before you even reach the main title sequence – and that still counts as a view.