Understanding Netflix’s growth over the years
What can we learn by analyzing Netflix’s open data about its huge success over the recent years?
Introduction
Netflix is one of the most popular movie / TV show streaming platforms in the market. Founded in 1997 as a mail DVD delivery service, it has grown to become a titan in the streaming business as well as an important content producer, with some of its most recent productions having received several Oscar nominations, such as The Irishman and Marriage Story most recently.
A dataset containing information of movie releases by year and country was recently made available on Kaggle. By going through the data I wondered if it was possible that it could tell the story of how Netflix skyrocketed to become a giant in the field by looking at indicators such as:
- Number of releases and content added over time
- Which are the countries that contribute the most to the number of content added to Netflix
- Splitting this data in relation to other variables in the database
The way this analysis was structured is that we are going to first look at the data at a global level, and them stratify it by country and other variables whenever it seems fit.
The github repository for this analysis can be found here.
Looking at the data on a global scale
An interesting way to understand how Netflix has grown over the last years is by looking at its content count (movies and tv shows) over the years. By looking at the picture below we can see that Netflix started recording increasingly high number of content in the platform from 2015, reaching its peak in absolute number of content added in 2019 with more than 2000 items added only in that year, more than 10 times the number of items added 4 years earlier. It is safe to assume that this number could have been even higher in 2020 if not for the Covid pandemic.
It is also possible to extract from this graph that movies are more numerous than TV shows. In order to understand better this proportion it is possible to build a simple tree map plot, where we can see that movies add up to 69% of the catalogue:
Which are the countries that contribute the most to content production?
To answer this second question the below barplot was created, where it displays the top 10 content producers on Netflix. As expected, the USA leads with over 3 times the amount of content released on the platform comparing to the second place, India. USA’s leadership can be explained due to its world leading film industry and also by the fact that Netflix is an American company.
It is interesting to analyze splitting by content among each of these countries in the top 10. The next plot does just that, where the top 3 content producers (USA, India and UK) are highlighted in the y-axis. It is possible to see that India focuses its content almost entirely on movies. This can be explained due to the great relevance of the Bollywood industry there which has a movie focused strategy. USA and the UK have their content a little more distributed, with a preference for movies in both cases.
For India the strength of its movie industry can be seen when we stratify the top 5 genre of movies added to its Netflix’s movie catalogue, as the top category with most number of items is “International movies”.
How do different countries target its audiences?
For the final question I wanted to see how different countries target its content to specific audiences. To do that, the top 3 content producers were chosen (for having the greater amount of data) and its data stratified generating the heatmap below:
We can observe that the USA and the UK target mostly the adult audience, whereas in India the teens are the preferred target audience. This could be due to cultural and demographic reasons and it is interesting to see how different countries have different types of audiences.
Conclusion
Netflix has come a long way since its inception in 1997 as DVD deliver business, being now a giant in the streaming business. By looking at data available it was clear that the company started its boom on content added to the platform in 2015. By 2019, they had multiplied that number to more than ten times. The USA, India and the UK are the leading countries in content production with a focus on movies more than tv shows. It was possible to extract from the data which are the preferred target audiences by country. By doing this types of analysis, such as the ones in this article, and going even deeper (by merging this dataset with others related, for instance) it is possible to understand what Netflix does right. This can be useful for its competitors in terms of business strategy for analysts that work in the field.