NBC exec gives estimated ratings of ‘Jessica Jones,’ ‘Master of None,’ other Netflix shows

Ever since its very beginning, there has been one part of the Netflix business model that the company has been extremely hush-hush about: The ratings for some of their shows. They’ve had no real tie to Nielsen, and therefore there has been no way to actually monitor what is successful and what is not.

However, has NBC found a way around that? It’s hard to say for sure how accurate some of their data is, but according to The Hollywood Reporter, data was gathered from a sample of 15,000 using audio recognition by San Francisco tech firm Symphony. The network’s Alan Wurtzel claimed that over the course of the final four months of the year, an average of 4.8 million watched Marvel’s “Jessica Jones” in the 18-49 demographic. (This is only part of the overall viewership, and as the aforementioned site notes, Netflix doesn’t care about demo ratings very much since they don’t have advertisers.

We also heard from Wurtzel that “Master of None” averaged 3.9 million in the demo using this same data, while “Narcos” scored a 3.2 million. Do these numbers seem very high? Definitely, but also remember here aside from the fact that these are not official that they cover in some cases many months of viewing. A number of network shows could also boast similar numbers when looked at across the same period of time.

What we’re mostly interested in now is if this prompts Netflix at some point to at least consider making their own figures a little bit clearer.

What do you think of the ratings, and the fact that NBC has figured out a way to release some of this information? Share with a comment.