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There’s been some to-be-expected wrestling TV viewership data controversy (my favorite type of controversy) about the numbers Netflix has listed in its “Tudum” top 10 rankings, for WWE Monday Night Raw, which so far have included each episode of the show since its move to streaming in January.
Netflix informed Wrestlenomics this week that the streamer has used the same methodology each week to determine the views data for Raw that we see in the Tudum rankings. Different methodologies have not been used for different episodes of Raw, Netflix told us.
According to a table Netflix shared with us (shown later in this article), live viewing for Raw is measured differently than delayed viewing for Raw because of different run times that a given episode of Raw has depending on when you watch it.
Netflix revealed data for the fifth episode of Raw on its platform this past week as part of its standard top 10 rankings release. So we now have data through the February 3 episode.
Questions have been raised about the methodology used to measure Raw because it’s become clear that the math doesn’t check out for Raw in the same way it does for other Netflix content in the rankings.
Let’s explain what I mean by that.
In addition to global views, Netflix also lists the hours viewed for each program in the top 10, as well as the runtime, as you can see for example in the latest listing of highly-viewed English language TV shows.
Views (a worldwide measurement, as Netflix is available throughout much of the world), seems to simply be a result of multiplying hours viewed by runtime. That is:
Views = hours viewed × runtime (in hours)
Therefore, for example, if you take the leading show for the week, The Night Agent: Season 2, and divide its hours viewed (64,400,000) by its runtime (8 hours and 36 minutes or 8.6 hours), when you round the result to the nearest 100,000, you get 7,500,000 global views — just like Netflix’s chart shows. Great. That checks out.
And if you run that check against every other row on the chart, it checks out just fine also… except for Raw.
If you do the same check on the data shown for the February 3 episode of Raw (6,100,000 divided by 1 hour 55 minutes—again, rounded to the nearest 100,000), you don’t get the 3,100,000 that Netflix lists above. Instead, you get a slightly higher value: 3,200,000.
That’s a 3% difference. Not nothing, but also not huge. Is it that big of a deal?
But wait. If you go back and check prior episodes of Raw, the difference has been more significant.
Fortunately, Netflix allows you download a spreadsheet with the full history of their weekly top 10 Tudum data (which is pretty cool if you’re into that kind of thing). So let’s look at every episode of Raw on Netflix so far:
As you can see in our thrilling arithmetic above, the differences for Raw in earlier weeks were more extreme, discrepancies that in most cases actually give you a lower result for views than what Netflix listed—except in the case of the post-Royal Rumble episode of Raw. For that episode, it appears Netflix listed a value 16% higher than the math suggests: 2.5 million instead of Netflix’s 2.9 million.
What else stands out is that the Royal Rumble—which streamed on Netflix internationally and had only been available for two days when its views were published—shows no difference between the straightforward calculation and Netflix’s reported number (2.1 million for both). This contrasts with each Raw figure, which reflects a full seven-day window.
So here’s the table Netflix provided us with.
A representative for Netflix explained, “This is a matter of the runtime changing live versus on SVOD,” referring to viewing on-demand, sometime after Raw has aired live.
That might also help to explain why there was no discrepancy for the Rumble, which had viewing displayed for two days, instead of seven.
“For live titles, we show the latest runtime on our Top 10. As an example, the January 6 premiere is listed as 2.4 hours long on Tudum (and on the product today) but was even longer live because of ads,” the representative added.
“When calculating Views, we implement a ‘Blended Views’ approach which calculates views for each individual cut (with its own runtime), and then takes the sum total (illustrated [in the example above]).”
Maybe there’s a way to deduce, based on the discrepancy, how much live versus delayed viewing there was on a given episode. But I haven’t tried to figure that out yet.
Brandon Thurston has written about wrestling business since 2015. He operates and owns Wrestlenomics.