The Netflix Top 10 most-watched list has proved to be a very useful tool for the millions of subscribers around the world who feel as though they spend almost as much time, if not more, trawling through the streaming service’s vast content library for something to flip on than they do actually watching the movie or TV show in question once a decision has painfully, agonizingly and finally been made.
Admittedly, the Top 10 has featured plenty of awful titles that managed to find a surprisingly wide audience on the platform, but it’s also allowed some hidden gems to gain the recognition they might not have gotten the first time around. Not everyone uses the rankings as the basis of their viewing habits, but a lot of people do, and there are clearly enough of them to have Netflix expand exponentially to a Top 50, which is now being tested, as you can see below.
Netflix has confirmed to me that is testing a Top 50 list, expanding on the Top 10 it rolled out earlier this year. In keeping with that feature, there is a Top 50 row for all content on the home page, and seperate lists for films and TV shows. pic.twitter.com/kzVVgNeRfW
— Saqib Shah (@eightiethmnt) November 25, 2020
The aim is to make it easier for users to find something to watch, when they want to watch it. Top 10 is a good resource for that, but ultimately limited seeing as NFLX has a massive, expanding library. Hence now some ppl are seeing a longer Top 50 row of top ranked content.
— Saqib Shah (@eightiethmnt) November 25, 2020
The more indecisive subscribers might be freaking out over potentially having five times as many movies and TV shows to painstakingly scroll through before finally settling on what to watch, but it does open up the door for even more lesser-known or underrated projects to be discovered by over 190 million people across the globe.
Of course, it could also be an entirely cynical exercise designed by Netflix to fine-tune the fabled algorithm that influences so much of the decision making at a boardroom level by widening the scope of the sample size. That being said, any form of popular technology has to constantly update itself and add new features to keep the user base engaged, and the Top 50 would be the latest experiment with the interface after testing playback speeds and adding the ability to remove content you’ve given up on from the Continue Watching row, not to mention the Top 10 itself.
