There's a hot new trend afoot: private companies releasing studies of their own propriety data to show how interesting/depraved we pitiful consumers are. First came the PornHub chronicles, when we learned that humans watched 4,392,486,580 hours of PornHub in 2015—two-and-a-half times longer than homo sapiens have been kicking it on Earth. And now we have Netflix data.
The streaming giant used three years of original series releases and nine years of streaming service overall to find that its 81 million viewers like to binge, and binge hard. The study, via The New York Times, found subscribers who watch the whole first season of a show normally do so in a week or less, and devote more than two hours a day to doing so.
But the study also detailed what kinds of shows get devoured at what rates. The most aggressively binged categories were horror, thrillers, and sci-fi, which viewers finished a season of at a median rate of four days. That's stuff like Breaking Bad, American Horror Story, and The Walking Dead.
Next up are "dramatic comedies, crime dramas, superhero shows" (Fargo, Orange Is the New Black), which come in at five days.
Then there's what the Times calls the "more relaxed" bingers, like political dramas and irreverent comedies, which viewers watch for about an hour and 45 minutes-a-day and polish off in six days.
It seems like even the relaxed bingers among us could use a little time outside.
