Netflix is rolling out a new advertising metric that it says shows the wide reach of its ad-supported subscription tier.
The streamer is calling it monthly active viewers, or MAV, and claims that it has 190 million such viewers in the 12 countries where it offers an ad tier. The idea behind it, Netflix president of advertising Amy Reinhard told reporters Wednesday, is to offer a “clear and understandable” benchmark for how many people are seeing commercials on Netflix.
MAV differs from the more familiar monthly active users (MAU), which measures the number of member profiles that engage with Netflix. MAV takes the number of users who have watched at least one minute of ad-supported programming on the streamer and multiplies that by the average number of people in a household (based on its internal research). The one-minute qualifier is reminiscent of an earlier method Netflix used to measure viewing of its series, which counted two minutes of watch time as a view. It has since switched to view counts measured as total viewing hours divided by running time for a show or movie, which other streamers have also adopted.
As for how Netflix settled on the one-minute threshold, Reinhard said that was the subject of a good amount of internal debate. “This came from cavnassing the landscape and seeing what some of our competitors were doing,” she said. “Some had a zero-second threshold, some had a 10-second threshold. We felt like one minute was, you’re logging onto the service and committing to a viewing session at that point. We thought that was a more accurate representation, and being transparent in terms of that one-minute threshold.”
At the upfronts in May, Reinhard said Netflix’s ad tier had 94 million monthly active users, which translated to about 170 million viewers — though she noted Wednesday that the earlier figure didn’t include the one-minute threshold. The company has spent the past several months refining that idea.
Reinhard also said that the MAV metric won’t necessarily affect how Netflix sells to advertisers. It’s intended, she said, to give a more transparent look at how users engage with the service.
