What Was The 2-Minute Rule On Netflix?

There was a time when Netflix had a lot of confidence in the “2-minute rule.” This controversial method was the way the streaming giant determined whether a household had watched a movie or television show. Under this old policy, users only needed to watch 2 minutes of a show for it to count as a view. It didn’t even matter whether you watched it to the end or stopped after 2 minutes and 1 second: A view was a view so long as it passed that two-minute threshold.

The rule was first introduced in 2020 and represented a major shift from Netflix’s previous standard. In years prior, a title was considered “viewed” after a user watched 70% of the movie or episode. For a 90-minute movie, that works out to a little over an hour. While it’s not how you might traditionally define having watched something, 70% is definitely much closer to the definition than 2 minutes is. At the time, the company claimed that switching to the 2-minute rule was actually more truthful than any percentage would be. In a letter to shareholders (via GameSpot), the service believed that a flat two-minute threshold treated short and long content more equally.

For context, at the time, the soon-to-be-shuttered Hulu was considering 10% watched as a view. Meanwhile, YouTube was counting 30 seconds as a view. That actually helps put this 2-minute rule in a new light: Most of the top streaming services were seemingly measuring viewer choice over 100% completion, and Netflix was merely following suit.

Luckily for fans of accurate reporting, Netflix eventually backed down from the nonsensical time-based rule. After all, two minutes might not even get you to the opening credits of some movies or TV shows. The metric was providing numbers 35% higher than before, and that hardly seems fair to those involved. So, Netflix pivoted to a new way of evaluating user engagement.

Today, Netflix measures a title’s performance by dividing the total hours viewed by its runtime. That gives the streaming service a much more accurate estimate of total views, but one that still leaves room for all those people who only watch a couple of minutes of something. Now, for a 90-minute movie, two people watching half of it (or 45 people all watching the first two minutes) would count as one collective view. It’s still not perfect, but it’s at least considerably fairer.