Background
Netflix is one of the top content platforms worldwide. In the mid January, Netflix has released its Fourth-Quarter 2020 financial statement. According to the statement, Netflix has earned a total revenue of $24,996,056 in 2020, which is 24% higher than it total revenue in 2019. Undoubtedly, Netflix id growing in a very rapid pace and based on that, I found that it will be interesting to analyze Netflix’s content distribution and national distribution using the time series data.
Collection Statistics: Movies & TV Shows
Of the 7,788 data points I collected since 1925 to 2021, Netflix has around 69% of movies and 31% of TV Shows. Although Netflix has more movies than TV Shows, in recent years, the number of TV Shows released on Netflix has growth in a faster speed than that of movies. As Figure 1 shows, TV Shows has a steeper slope than Movies. This finding is very interesting as it could shed light on Netflix’s overall business strategy. It could be inferred that Netflix is altering its track, investing more on TV Shows instead of movies. One possible reason might because that the cost of making a movie is much higher than making TV shows and TV shows tend to have more than one season and thus could better keep audience within Netflix.
Meanwhile, it is also interesting to take a look at the duration of movies since 1925. As Figure 2 shows, we can see a trend that between 1940s to 1950s, the duration of a movie tends to last between 35 minutes 60 minutes. However, since 1960s, the duration of movie increases by an exceedingly high speech and reached 225 minutes. However, after that, it decreases dramatically and eventually fluctuates between 90 minutes to 130 minutes. Since 2020, the duration of movies seemed have a slighter decreases, but without further data support, it is not sure that such decrease is within a normal fluctuation.
Collection Statistics: Distribution by Country
After examining Netflix’s database by types of content, now I will analyze its content distribution by countries, ratings and genres. As Figure 3 shows, U.S. is at the first place regrading on the number of movies and TV Shows produced. There is a total number of 2555 movies& TV shows made by the U.S. in Netflix. Indian ranks the 2nd place with a total number of 923 movies & TV shows. The top5 countries which made the most movies and TV shows in Netflix are respectively, U.S., India, UK, Japan and Korea. Personally, it is actually surprising to find out that Indian movies & TV shows have such a high number in Netflix, comparing with UK movies & TV shows.
Collection Statistics: Distribution by Rating
Meanwhile, when examining the rating distribution (Figure4), it could also be noticed that most of the movies & TV Shows are rated as TV-MA, TV-14 and TV-PG. It is easily understandable that after all Netflix’s main audiences are adults and thus many of its movies and TV Shows are intended to be viewed by mature, adult audiences. Noticeably, movies & TV Shows (TV-Y7, TV-G) which are suitable for kids only occupy a small percentage. Hence, it can be inferred that young kids apparently are not Netflix’s targeted audiences.
Collection Statistics: Distribution by Genre
Figure 5 presents the distribution of genres of Netflix’s movies and TV Shows. Documentary occupies the highest percentage which is over 35%. Following to that, Stand-Up Comedy occupies around 25 per cent and Dramas, International movies has a percentage of around 10. However, this particular analysis is up to certain limits. The original database only provides ‘Listed_in’ as a column and does not provide ‘Genre’ directly. Therefore, we can also see that there are many overlapping in genres. For example, ‘Dramas, International Movies’ ranks the 3rd place and ‘Comedies, Dramas, International Movies’ ranks the 4th place. There should be a large overlapping of content between these two different ‘Listed-in’.
Collection Statistics: Genre Differences among Top5 Countries
Previously, we have known that the top5 countries which released movies & TV Shows are U.S., India, UK, Japan and South Korea. Here, I would like to have a closer examination of the differences in genres between these countries. The result is shown in Figure 6. It could be seen that in South Korea, movies & TV Shows listed in the category ‘International TV Shows, Korean TV Shows, Romantic TV Shows’ has the highest percentage which is around 34%. For Japan, ‘Anime Series, International TV Shows’ occupies around 30%. For U.S. and UK, documentary is the most popular. For India, ‘Dramas, International Movies’ has the highest percentage.
Summary of Analysis
This reports gives a general glance at Netflix’s content distribution and its business strategy. First of all, Netflix still has more movies than TV Shows; however, in recent years, Netflix is changing to invest more on TV Shows. Secondly, Netflix’s targeted audience is still adults and many of its movies are not suitable for young kids. Thirdly, U.S., India, UK, Japan and South Korea are the Top5 movies & TV Shows producers in Netflix and ‘Documentary’ is the most common type presented in Netflix.
Attached is my codes for this EDA Project:
https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1-OZZn7Au-hnX5OnOP6ehYuDfpn6LGI0l?usp=sharing
