Netflix: Watching the Juggernaut in the First Half of 2025

Netflix is going all McDonald’s or maybe even Carl Sagan, as “billions and billions” now applies not just to burgers served or to heavenly bodies but also to audiences. According to the publicly traded streamer’s own “What We Watched” report, posted this week and covering the first half of 2025, Netflix around the world showed 95 billion hours of content.

While Netflix doesn’t divulge its subscriber numbers, Evoca.tv estimates that the number is on the order of 301.6 million. Which is remarkable given that the number four years ago was on the order of 207.6 million. That’s an increase of 45%. Try to think of a business where there has been an increase of that magnitude coming from such a large starting point. It may make your head hurt.

And that’s in an “attention economy” that has never been tighter with more platforms, more services, and more attractions on each service than ever before.

(OK. Luminate, the entertainment data tracking and measurement firm, just released its “2025 Midyear Music Report” that has even bigger numbers in the audio space, with global on-demand streams hitting 2.5 trillion listening hours, of which some 697 billion were in the U.S. Spotify, with about 675 million active users, accounts for about a third of that number.)

Back to the 95 billion hours.

Given the number of subscribers (301.6 million), if each of them watched the same amount of Netflix, that would mean 13 days during the first half. Or every single subscriber watching about an hour and three quarters every single day. Or about 10% of those subscribers’ waking hours.

There is another big set of billions associated with Netflix. A financial one. The company reported operating income of $3.8 billion. That is up 45% year-over-year.

The company reported to shareholders that, no longer is it projecting revenue of $43.5 – 44.5 billion, rather it is now anticipating $44.8 -$45.2 billion. In other words, its current low projection is higher than its previous high projection.

What’s more, Netflix is a vertically integrated company, deeply invested in production. So it thinks its success is good for America — estimating that it contributed $125 billion to the U.S. economy between 2020 and 2024. This is predicated on hiring more than 140,000 cast and crew members, and working with at least 550 U.S. production companies, having 9,000 full-time employees, expanding its studio in Albuquerque, building a new studio complex in Eatontown and Oceanport, New Jersey (a $1-billion capital project), and more.

It is important to underscore that Netflix is also a global phenomenon. In the first half of 2025, two-thirds of its members were outside the U.S. and a third of the titles viewed were in languages other than English.

While that might seem odd: 2/3 outside the U.S. but only 1/3 non-English titles, there are actually more English speakers in the world—some 1.5 billion—than speakers of any other language, with Mandarin Chinese coming in second, at 1.1 billion.

And, of course, English comes from, well, England, which was the source of the most-popular show during the period: Adolescence with 145-million views. Also bolstering the U.K. numbers were Missing You (58 million), Black Mirror season 7 (31 million), and Dept. Q (25 million).

There are slightly different ways to crunch the numbers so, while South Korea’s Squid Game had a higher number than Adolescence, its 231 million views are a combination of all three seasons. Squid Game season two, with 117 million views, came in second overall.

In terms of U.S. productions, Zero Day (61 million views) ranks fourth in the most-watched shows during the first half.

The U.S. did better in terms of movies, with Back in Action (Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx, 165 million), Straw (Tyler Perry, 103 million), and The Life List (Sofia Carson, 96 million) being at the top of the most-watched list.

An interesting aspect of what people are watching is material that’s been around for a while. Series like Orange Is the New Black (2013), Ozark (2017) and Money Heist (2017) each had over 100 million hours of viewing in the first half. The company calculates that of the Netflix Originals on the service, nearly half of the viewing during the first half were of titles that were available in 2023 and earlier.

Although Netflix is not the only proverbial game in town, in some regards it is. Amazon Prime Video is second to Netflix in terms of subscribers at approximately 240 million, but that number includes all the customers who spend (in the U.S.) $14.99 per month in order to get free shipping. It’s certainly not an apples-to-apples measurement and they might not spend much time watching Prime Video.

Disney+ is in third place. According to global statistical analysis firm Statista, Disney+ had 126 million subscribers in Q2 2025. The firm characterizes Disney+’s growth since its November 2019 launch as “particularly noteworthy,” pointing out, “it took Netflix, the current market leader, about a decade to achieve similar customer numbers in a less competitive landscape.”

Still, maybe it is the first-mover advantage. Or the array of content. Or both.

But whatever it is, Netflix is on a roll and is revving its content engines to gain greater momentum. In its Q2 letter to shareholders the company described its “2025 slate being unusually second-half weighted.”

The letter means shows like the second season of Wednesday and the fifth and final season of Stranger Things. In terms of films there will be Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly with George Clooney and Adam Sandler; Katheryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite with Idris Elba and Rebecca Ferguson; and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, with Oscar Isaac and Mia Goth.

Carl Sagan said, “We are made of star-stuff.” Netflix is trying to make sure that is also true of its programming and hoping, with precedent, that the numbers of viewer will only grow commensurately.