Does Anyone Actually Watch Things On Their Watchlists?

153. That's the total number of movies and TV shows on my Netflix watchlist. It's quite of a backlog, filled with documentaries such as Ava DuVernay's "13th," classics like "Scarface" and ponderous independent films like "The Ornithologist" and "On Body and Soul." It's a substantial, varied list with a lot of good titles on them that I would love to watch someday. The problem is "someday" never seems to be today.

The truth is that when I do need to find something to watch on Netflix, the rows recommended to me by the platform's algorithms are my go-to source. I either continue with TV shows that I've rewatched, or every once in awhile, I might take a gamble on a Netflix original and watch titles that are advertised prominently on my homepage, like "The Haunting of Hill House." It's not that I never look at my watchlist, but it's more that even when I do browse through it, it's a rare case where I'm motivated to watch something that has been sitting on my list for awhile, gathering metaphorical dust. There is no way that the titles themselves can gather dust — they are, after all, not DVDs — but it seems that the more time has passed since I've added a title to a list, the least likely I am to watch it because of its loss of novelty.

Am I the only person who overestimates my ability to want to watch a challenging movie like Angelina Jolie's "First They Killed My Father" on a Thursday night after a long day at work, or do other people share the same issues with their watchlists? What is the average streaming rate of watchlists in general? And if none of us ever finish or even consult our watchlists anymore, should they still exist?

To Each List Her Own

To find out whether I'm the only person who's unable to complete my watchlist, I interviewed a few people around me who are either zealous streamers or passionate list-builders, about their watchlist habits. I also sat down and took a long and hard look at my own Netflix watchlist to look at the number of movies and shows I have watched to completion, the titles I've exited before I reached the end and the things I've left utterly untouched.

Of the 153 items currently on my Netflix list, there are 95 that have been sitting in the queue untouched. That's a little over 60% of my list that has not received much, if any, attention since being added to my watchlist. There are almost 50 movies and TV shows that I've watched in part. The mileage varies, however, and encompasses shows like "Mindhunter," which I've binge-watched when it first became available for streaming but stopped before the finale, and movies like "Certain Women," which I exited after only a few minutes of viewing.

In total, there have been only 11 titles that I have watched in its entirety, which brings the completion rate of my Netflix watchlist at 7.19%. And of those 11 titles, 10 are Netflix originals, which may speak to the efficacy of the platform's advertising of its original content, and the one outlier is the fantasy extravaganza "Cloud Atlas." If we look at my watchlist streaming habits in very rough numbers, for every 10 titles on my watchlist, six have never been watched, three have been watched in part and a little less than one has been streamed to completion.

Is my completion rate higher or lower than people around me? The answer is complicated. One of the first things I quickly became aware of in my interviews with other streaming site users was that many use their watchlists in a much broader sense than I do. While I limit my watchlist only to titles that I haven't seen before or had only seen in part, most people I interviewed also use their watchlists to include movies, shows and other videos they have seen before and intend to rewatch.

Because of this, their completion rates and their ways of engaging with their watchlists may diverge greatly from mine. My own sister, for instance, told me that she uses the "Watch later" list on her YouTube account as a curated playlist for all of her favorite K-pop music videos. She's listened or watched nearly 95% of the content on her list¹, which puts her completion rate much higher than my average completion rate across multiple platforms.

My friend, Rae Chou, a cultural studies researcher in Taiwan and an avid user of multiple list-building and management apps, told me she always includes a few titles on her watchlist for the specific purpose of re-watching on Netflix. In Chou's case, it's shows and movies like "Parks and Recreation" and "Neighbors 2," titles which serve as staples of comfort watching as well as a source of white noise — there are times when she's not even actively watching the movie or TV show, but just lets it play in the background while she works. Since re-watching is a significant part of her Netflix experience, she engages with her Netflix list on a far higher frequency than I do.

In contrast to my Netflix watchlist, which is curated specifically for my own viewing, she adds titles that she believes her mother or her boyfriend might enjoy. The completion rate of her watchlist is slightly higher from mine — of the 42 titles on her Netflix list, she has finished three to four, which puts her completion rate at around 9% — and she points out she's more likely to watch something till the end if she's watching it with other people. The drive to finish something if there's a communal element to it applies to her reading habits, too, and not just streaming. As Chou explains to me, although she has over 100 links saved on Facebook that she'll likely never be able to get to completely, she almost always reads the article links she posts on her Facebook wall because of its more public nature.

Like me, Chou admits she spends more time looking at the programming Netflix has recommended to her through their algorithms these days instead of shuffling through her watchlist for something new to watch. It's a sentiment that's also echoed by another friend, Cameron Lindsey, a PhD student at the University of Texas-Austin who has written about Netflix's impact on the consumption of television. Lindsey has owned a Netflix account since 2008 and also uses several other subscription streaming services, such as Hulu, Amazon Prime and HBO Go. He has built watchlists on nearly every service — Netflix being the most robust — but, according to him, he hardly ever accesses them.

When he wants to find something to stream, Lindsey says that either he already has a very clear idea of what shows he wants to watch and searches for those specific titles or, in the case of his usage of Netflix, he skims through the platform's various rows on his homepage for newly-released content and recommendations.

It's more difficult to track Lindsey's completion rate since titles have disappeared from his list or he's removed them over the years, but out of a list of 47 titles, he has finished two shows, "Oh, Hello on Broadway" and CNN's documentary mini-series "The Eighties," which makes his watchlist completion rate around 4.25%.

The fact that he's had Netflix for 10 years has definitely shaped the makeup of his watchlist. The cache of movies and TV shows, saved across the years, is essentially a time capsule. Not only has it captured and preserved moments of his past — moments that may be lost to him now, given the time that has lapsed — but it also documents turning points in Netflix's own history.

On his watchlist, for example, there is "Lilyhammer," Netflix's first foray into original programming in 2012 that would later pave the way for shows like "Orange is the New Black" and "House of Cards." While Netflix is now geared towards spending more money on original content, back in 2012, that wasn't the case yet and "Lilyhammer" is the show the marked a new era for the company.

The relevance of certain titles on his list, on the other hand, have lessened with the passage of time. He admits there are shows and movies on his watchlist he's never going to watch, primarily because he can't recall why he had added them or wanted to watch them in the first place. "I will probably never watch 'Mitt,' 'Marco Polo,' 'Hell on Wheels,' 'Into the Wild' or 'Black Dynamite,'" he confesses. If the decision to stream something over another is motivated by impulse, then these are impulses that can no longer be recalled, yet which remain, because of the simple action of list-building, suspended in time and preserved against the attrition of a user's memory.

What About The Average User?

It's difficult to obtain exact figures on how users of Hulu or Netflix would use their watchlist. Companies like Netflix are notoriously private about sharing their viewership data and all of the streaming platforms I reached out to refused to comment on the completion rates of their users' watchlists. It's also worth noting that not every user may use their watchlist, especially given how significant a role algorithmic recommendations now play in driving traffic in streaming platforms. Netflix estimates that 75% of its viewing activity is driven by recommendations, and YouTube says more than 70% of the time users spend on the site is on videos recommended by Google's AI algorithms.

But for the users who do use their watchlists, what would their follow-through rates look like? By talking to several streaming search sites, websites like JustWatch, Reelgood and GoWatchIt, which help users find the services on which they can stream shows they want to see, I was able to gain insights into how the average users of streaming search engine sites might engage with their watchlists.

In the case of JustWatch, CEO David Croyé says although they're unable to track whether or not a user actually streamed a show or movie to completion, they do have data on how often users click on a title on their watchlist to link out to streaming services. Overall, the click rates on the watchlists users have built on JustWatch is somewhere between five to 10%, a range that, interestingly, users like me, Chou and Lindsey more or less fall into in terms of our watchlist completion rates.

Croyé also points out that the starting point of most users on JustWatch is the "New" tab, which allows users to browse through the recently added movies and TV shows on streaming services. Compared to the checking of newly-available content, the accessing of the watchlist is only the second most popular use case on the site, Croyé says.

The tendency for users to gravitate towards newly-released titles is also mirrored in the behavior of users of Reelgood, a website that, like JustWatch, allows people to search for content across platforms and networks. According to Eli Chamberlin, the Head of Product and Design at Reelgood, when they surveyed their users on how they figured out what to watch on a nightly basis, the most common answer was watching newly-released episodes of a TV show they followed. By comparison, digging through the backlogs to watch a movie or a TV show on their watchlists was a measure users would resort to much later in the process, assuming that other options, such as watching newly-available content, had failed to pique their viewing interest.

Like JustWatch, Reelgood also doesn't have the ability to gauge whether users' clicks on titles on their watchlists translate to completed viewings on streaming services. The interaction rate or lack thereof, however, is much easier to calculate than the completion rate. Chamberlin says around 75%² of the titles on active users' watchlists receive no user engagement. User engagement is defined by Chamberlin to include actions such as the marking of a title as "Already Seen," the clicking on a title to stream it on an outbound link or the opening of the details page of movie or TV show. Although one in four of the titles of an average Reelgood user's watchlist receives interaction of some form, it's safe to assume that the actual completion rate of these streamings would be lower than 25%.

The users' level of engagement with their watchlists also depends on the streaming search site. For GoWatchIt, clicks on users' watchlists are usually lower than clicks on the title pages of individual movies, according to CEO and founder David Larkin. Since most of the users of GoWatchIt are one-off users who want a quick answer to which services have the movies they want to see, Larkin says, the number of people actively managing their watchlists is slim compared to users who are just searching for titles and then moving on.

The use case of Letterboxd, a film social networking site to which Larkin is an advisor, is, however, very different from GoWatchIt when it comes to list-building. Unlike GoWatchIt, Letterboxd is not a streaming search engine site, but a social network for film lovers to keep film dairies, create themed lists and share opinions on movies they've seen. Its users seem to be slanted more towards cinephiles rather than casual viewers, and the majority of its star contributors have written up hundreds of movie reviews on the website and marked over thousands of movies as seen.

According to Matthew Buchanan, the co-founder of Letterboxd, the average number of movies in a user's watchlist is 45 and the completion rate for watchlisted movies is 16.8%³. Whether or not a watchlist is private or public seems to have little impact on the completion rate. The completion rate is marginally higher for private watchlists — 17.5% — as opposed to watchlists that are public, which is 16.7%. Both figures are, however, much higher than the completion rate of either myself or most of the people I've interviewed.

The watchlist completion rate of members, in addition, seems to rise incommensurate with their level of engagement on the website. Buchanan points out that if we looked at certain engagement metrics and honed in on members who have logged at least 10 films in their diary, the size of their watchlists swells to 173 films and the completion rate increases to 19.6%. And for extremely engaged Letterboxd members — members who have recorded over 100 dairy entries — the completion rate is even higher, at 21.5%.

Should I Feel Bad About Not Being A Watchlist Completionist?

While the figures may vary according to the website and the metric, one thing is clear though: I'm hardly the only person who has trouble completing my watchlist. Even among viewers who are avid film lovers, such as the members of Letterboxd, the data shows most people leave far more movies or shows on their watchlist unwatched rather than watched. If we use the completion rate of Letterboxd's most engaged members as a gauge, the completion rate is around 20%, which means only around a fifth of the titles on watchlists actually get watched — and these are figures from users who are clearly devoted to the consumption of movies.

The fact that watchlists are highly aspirational is something industry executives acknowledge. Buchanan says there's a high degree of aspirational usage of watchlists on their website and there are plenty of instances of "watchlist bankruptcy," where users request to have their lists wiped clean by Letterboxd so that they can start over with a clean slate. And even David Burhenne-Sanderson, the founder of Reelgood, admits that he too has the same issue with his personal watchlist, as there are many movies and shows he believes he should watch, but which fall to the wayside when, for example, he chooses to stream a comedy on a Friday night over a documentary in his backlog.

But is a lack of completion necessarily a bad thing? Statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb advocated in his book "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" for the value of the antilibrary, a concept which Taleb defines as the collection of unread books in one's personal library. Taleb argues that people tend to overvalue the known over the unknown and that knowledge is often treated as "an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order" or "personal property to be protected and defended." In his opinion, unread books are actually more valuable to us than read ones and that "[p]eople don't walk around with anti-résumés telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it's the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did."

In her reading of Taleb's book, Jessica Stillman believes it's actually a good sign for one's library to be overstuffed with items you haven't read yet. Being surrounded by an antilibrary is a potent reminder of one's limitations and ignorance and helps one retain a level of intellectual humility, she says.

Taleb's concept of the antilibrary and the value of the unknown comforts me as it helps acknowledge an unknown bias I harbored myself, the privileging of knowledge and media I have consumed over those I haven't. While I've long regarded my lack of completion of my watchlist as a failing, perhaps the titles that have been sitting on my watchlist could be seen as a form of an antilibrary, challenging me with all I have yet to see.

Furthermore, is a watchlist not working just because people never complete it? Not necessarily. There are several reasons for a watchlist to exist beyond mere tallying and completion. From a purely pragmatic sense, watchlists on Netflix, for instance, have the pivotal function of shaping Netflix's recommendations to users and, hence, what their Netflix pages look like. While I may not watch every TV show and movie I add to my list, the action of curating my watchlist has led to Netflix rows such as "Because you added _______ to your list" and me uncovering titles I may not have otherwise stumbled upon on my own. The titles on my watchlist are therefore more than endpoints within themselves; instead, they are stepping stones, leading me along the way to a new destination point, the movie or show I do eventually end up watching.

There's also another hidden value of the watchlist, one that I only recently realized. As someone who has just moved and started a new Netflix account⁴, I have felt the bareness of a newly inhabited space acutely within these past few weeks. Staring at a freshly-made Netflix homepage has had uncanny resemblances to being in a new apartment room, where the walls are unadorned, the furnishings are still minimal and nothing feels like home yet.

Unconsciously, the first thing I found myself doing when faced with a new Netflix account was adding titles to my list. When confronted with a sea of unfamiliar content, some of which were not necessarily to my taste, curation was a means to anchor myself and start slowly making this new digital space my own. In a way, it was akin to building a new home: every title I attached to my list, from "Feminists: What Were They Thinking?" to "Chilling Adventures of Sabrina," was a new furnishing I could add to my space to give it more distinctiveness, to make it more me.

In his Vox piece that looks into consumer behavior and why we buy the things we buy, David Sax claims, "[w]e buy as much to belong as to own." One of the examples he brought up was how certain consumers might choose to shop at an independent bookstore, instead of Amazon, and how that choice is interconnected with a desire to belong to a certain community, one that shares one's values and purchase habits. The act of buying is tied to a sense of belonging as well as an assertion of one's identity, as Sax explains, "the value of showing off their Politics & Prose tote bag or proudly holding up their copy of Roxane Gay's 'Hunger' on the subway is as powerful a symbol you can send into the world that I am book people as any overt declaration on social media."

Adding a movie or a TV show to my list seems like a similar action that is part acquisition, part private declaration of identity. Our identity as viewers are, after all, not merely informed by the movies and TV shows we have watched, but also by those which we claim for future consumption, the "First They Killed My Father"s and "13th"s we want to watch because we want to belong to the kind of community that does. When viewed in this light, my Netflix watchlist suddenly adds up to much more than merely a list of 153 titles and a 7.19% completion rate: it is an amalgamation of desire, aspiration and compromise. It is a reflection of who we are as viewers and who we want to be, of accomplished viewings and exploration yet to come. Do we ever complete our watchlists? No, not really. Can we be a bit too optimistic in our building of them? Maybe, but that optimism is integral to the process of curation and list-building. Is there a reason for watchlists to exist then? Yes, definitely.​