Melitopol, Ukraine – September 28, 2022: Netflix logo icon isolated on shape of cubes. Netflix is a global provider of streaming movies and TV series.
Outside of the local Top 10s, a few third-party metrics exist to tally the audiences and viewership of platforms like Netflix. A recent media leak gives a little more insight into the most-watched French programs for the last few weeks in May. Here is what we learned.
For decades, French ratings company Médiamétrie has provided up-to-date ratings for all linear TV channels to both the audience at large and the subscribing companies. But doing the same for platforms proved elusive, as Netflix, Prime Video or Disney+ would not share or allow the ratings information to be shared. As they all introduced a tier with ads, negotiations were underway, as brands were pushing to have ratings released to see whether their ad campaigns worked. Last fall, Médiamétrie announced that they would provide ratings information for three platforms to their clients: Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+, and would eventually release publicly some of their numbers later in 2026.
But as of June 2026, this public release has yet to materialize… And clients receiving the weekly numbers are strictly prohibited from sharing them, as they are confidential. Last weekend, major newspaper Le Parisien got their hands on a leaked chart for the most-watched programs for the last two weeks of May 2026 in France.
What were the most-watched programs on Netflix last month?
Coach Raymond Domenech talking to media. Cr : Netflix.
The tally includes viewed content from close to 3,000 connected boxes representative of several profiles of subscribers. The ranking is also different, counting a single-episode program like a movie, a documentary or an unscripted special as a “one-off”, and continuing series as another category. It also measures and privileges completion of a single program or season.
Within those Médiamétrie parameters, docuseries The Bus, documenting the strike and national controversy linked to the 2010 World Cup football team, holds a comfortable lead with an average of 270,000 viewers over the first week. On May 31st, a million views had been recorded. Over the first 10 days of availability, movie Ladies First had gathered 660,000 viewers. New releases Apex and animated movie Swapped also garnered 2.7 million and 2.1 million viewers, respectively, while K-Pop Demon Hunters has a grand total of 13 million viewers since its launch last September, according to Médiamétrie. On the TV show side, the first two weeks of release of Berlin garnered 720,000 viewers.
What can we learn from these reports?
Netflix indicated it rallied a total of 30 million viewers in France for the month of May; it had previously disclosed, during the launch of TF1+, that its subscriber base is close to 13 million. However, the story in Le Parisien raises criticisms from competing executives that programs measured on platforms still have a way lower French viewership than linear programs, which also routinely count 7-day replay in total viewership. Nevertheless, the leak is infuriating to both Médiamétrie and Netflix; the former is still in a phase of testing for these particular ratings, while the latter did not confirm the accuracy of the reports, while conceding that “it reflects the numbers we see on internal tools.” Overall viewership, and ways of measuring it, is still a very sensitive prospect for all platforms; it remains to be seen whether Médiamétrie will eventually release publicly overall ratings culled from that data.
