Squid Game has recently been named the most popular series on Netflix beating Bridgerton. Not only that, this South Korean series also donated a lot of money to Netflix.
Bloomberg reports Squid Game contributed an impact value of USD 891 million for Netflix. This figure is taken from confidential data in Netflix internal reports.
Impact value here refers to the indicators that Netflix uses to evaluate the contribution of their content to revenue based on how many subscribers have watched a content.
The figure of Rp 12.5 trillion for a series with non-English dialogue is quite fantastic. But even more astonishing, Squid Game was produced with only a budget of USD 21.4 million.
In fact, according to several entertainment industry officials, if Netflix produces Squid Game in Hollywood, the costs could increase 5-10 times because they have to pay famous actors with higher salaries and a work system that follows television unions.
The Bloomberg report also reveals some details about the Squid Game that Netflix doesn't usually reveal. As is well known, Netflix usually only discloses how many users watched a piece of content for more than two minutes, and never revealed the number of viewers who watched the content until it was finished.
Based on a Bloomberg report, Netflix estimates that 89% of the total viewers who start watching Squid Game will continue watching for at least 75 minutes, at least for more than one episode.
132 million people watched Squid Game for at least two minutes in its first 23 days since its release. Meanwhile, 87 million people or 66% of the total audience watched the Squid Game to the end in its first 23 days.
A Bloomberg report says that Netflix subscribers overall spent more than 1.4 billion hours watching Squid Game. Although this report shows a positive number, Netflix is not happy that Bloomberg is disclosing its internal data to the public.
"Netflix does not discuss these metrics outside of the company and will take significant steps to protect them from being exposed," Netflix's attorneys said.
