Twice a year Netflix release their viewing figures, showing “hours viewed” and “views” (see links at the bottom). I usually have a delve into this data – and have found that there are a bunch of things to watch out for:
- The reports are EVERYTHING that is on Netflix and I was only interested in comedy specials (which can be found on the worksheet “TV”). This means that I have to first look up all the comedy specials and then filter them out.
- Everything is displayed as nice, rounded figures. They don’t say at which number they round UP – but it does mean that these are just slightly vague guidelines as to how popular something was.
- For comedy specials the “hours viewed” should probably be ignored. Most comedy specials are ABOUT an hour – but not many of them are exactly an hour. There is a James Acaster special that is 3.5 hours long and so it has 2.7m “hours viewed”, but only 500k actual “views”.
- There is a column for “available globally” and all of the comedy specials that I extracted (USA and UK) said NO. What they don’t tell you is who does NOT get to see the special.
Natural Born Killer
If we first of all look at the 2024 release of Natural Born Killer (NBK), as I have the most data on that (having spotted some anomalies, at the time, I’d downloaded some screenshots etc.).
Released on April 16th 2024 the Netflix Top 10 chart page showed that, in the week of 15-21 April, NBK was top 10 in 23 countries.
Americas: Canada
Europe: Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden, UK
Africa: South Africa
Asia: Cyprus, Singapore, Sri Lanka
Oceania: Australia, New Zealand
The first anomaly that I’d spotted was that, using a traffic website (that had API connections into Netflix) and then checking it out via live Netflix (by switching my VPN to different locations) that first week it was actually showing as Top 10 in 28 countries, not 23.
The ones not listed by Netflix were: Greece, Israel, Serbia, UAE, USA
I’m not sure how the difference came about but, when you view Netflix online, through a VPN pointing at, for example, the USA – it SAYS that these are the shows and Top 10 from the USA and also the listings for each country will often have enough differences to stand out. And, yes, saddo that I am, I downloaded screenshots to see whether I was going mad or not.
And then, on April 20th, it hit a peak of 29 Top 10 positions (according to this streaming data website) because Portugal joined the party.
Between April and Dec 2024, it had 4.7m views.
2023-4 Netflix Total Views
Now let’s look at the total views, from 1st Jan 2023 up to 31st December 2024, for Jimmy’s 4 specials.
I downloaded the 4 half yearly reports and then extracted the data for 253 comedy specials. The 2023 report for Jan to Jun only had “hours viewed” and so this skewed things a little. Some specials that I’d gathered up had dropped off the listing in the 2nd half of 2023. As the data available was only for the first period, I dropped those out of my reports.
I then looked in more detail at the people that had had 2+ specials, to give a total for the biggest UK / US comedy stars, for comparison. Which, to be fair, excluded a couple of names that I wasn’t massively familiar with – and a new kid on the block (Gillis). The excluded specials were:
- Shane Gillis – Beautiful Dogs 9.9m views
- Katt Williams – Woke Foke 13.1m views
- Your Friend, Nate Bargatze 7.4m views
- Mike Epps – Ready to Sell Out 7.3m views
There are, of course, “lies, damn lies and statistics” – so this is just for interest. It’s also comparing specials that were released at vastly different times.
Because there was not a “views” column for half of 2023 – the 2nd half (of 2023) is lumped into the final column, below.
Note that the two older specials (Funny Business and Best of Ultimate…) would have had their highest viewing figures prior to 2023. This means that, with all of the comedy specials, anything released prior to 2023 is not showing the TOTAL views received, from day of release.
If we look at the “total views” for 2023-4 we can see that Jimmy listed 7th, from this sample group, with 8m views in the 2-year period.
If we look at just 2024 – Jimmy moves up to 4th, with 6.7m views.
Regardless of the ranking – because of the size of their demographic audience the US stars always dominate the charts. That 3 of the Brits (Carr, Gervais and Whitehall) manage to muscle their way into the top end of the viewing figures is pretty impressive.
The rest of the Brits (Michael McIntyre, Fern Brady, Micky Flanagan, Kevin Bridges, Greg Davies, James Acaster, Romesh Ranganathan, Russell Howard, Katherne Ryan, Phil Wang, Mo Gilligan) were all 1 million views or less, for the 2-year period.
2021 Most Streamed Stand-up UK
British Comedy Guide reported that Jimmy’s special (His Dark Material) was the most streamed of the year.
- Jimmy Carr – His Dark Material (2021) – 1.7m
- Russell Howard – Lubricant (2021) – 1.6m
- James Acaster – Repertoire (2018) – 840k
- Ricky Gervais – Humanity (2018)
- Michael McIntyre – Showman (2020)
- Greg Davies – You Magnificent Beast (2018)
- Jack Whitehall – I’m Only Joking (2020)
- Phil Wang – Philly Philly Wang Wang (2021)
- Daniel Sloss – Live Shows (2018)
- Russell Howard – Recalibrate (2017)
2019 Top 10 Stand-up
Chortle reported some stats, direct from Netflix, for the Top 10 specials, based on UK viewing figures, during 2019:
- Jack Whitehall: Christmas with My Father
- Kevin Hart: Irresponsible
- Jimmy Carr: The Best of Ultimate Gold Greatest Hits
- Dave Chapelle: Sticks & Stones
- Mo Gilligan: Momentum
- Amy Schumer: Growing
- Katherine Ryan: Glitter Room
- Ken Jeong: You Complete Me, Ho
- Bill Burr: Paper Tiger
- Simon Amstell: Set Free
2016 to 2019 Stand-up Top 20
And for another perspective – in 2020 Chortle reported that VOD Clickstream had analysed Netflix traffic, from the UK, and come up with what they think was the Top 20 most watched stand-ups (between Jan 2016 and July 2019).
- Dave Chappelle
- Jimmy Carr
- Jack Whitehall
- Frankie Boyle
- Jim Jefferies
- Louis CK
- Bill Burr
- Kevin Hart
- Bo Burnham
- Ricky Gervais
- Joe Rogan
- John Mulaney
- Trevor Noah
- Iliza Shlesinger
- Tom Segura
- Gabriel Iglesias
- Russell Howard
- Ali Wong
- Hannibal Buress
- Greg Davies
Netflix half yearly report links:
2023 Jan to June
2023 July to Dec
2024 Jan to June
2024 July to Dec
Weekly Netflix report:
Top 10 – can display Top 10 shows / TV either globally or by country
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