Netflix assured this Tuesday that "The Squid Game" ("The Squid Game") is the best premiere in the history of the platform, adding 111 million viewers in its first 28 days of broadcast.
The South Korean series, which has become a worldwide mass phenomenon, thus surpasses other successful formats such as "Bridgerton", which until now held the record with 82 million viewers, "The Queen’s Gambit", "Stranger things", "Tiger king" or the spanish "Money heist" ("The Money Heist").
However, given the Netflix audience data, it is advisable to walk with lead, since the method used by the platform to define a viewing is very controversial: it is enough for a subscriber to watch a specific content for two minutes for it to be counted. as a spectator.
The company keeps everything related to its audiences with absolute secrecy, which are not audited by an external company as traditional television networks have been used to for years.
Despite the doubts about how he counts his successes (of his failures there is no news), it is clear that "The Squid Game" it is one of the most popular television formats in the last year.
According to Google metrics, searches related to the series dwarf those of any other title, the Vans shoes that its protagonists wear have increased their sales by 7,800% and a South Korean internet operator even asked Netflix for compensation for the increase in band use that marked its premiere in South Korea.
Netflix’s chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, already warned a couple of weeks ago that the series had "many chances to become your most important program".
The plot of "The Squid Game" It starts with the protagonist Seong Gi-hun, a man in debt who contacts the organizer of a competition that could be the solution to all his problems. There, you will find 455 people of different social class, all with the same red numbers, ready to fight life or death for a millionaire prize.
The success of the series surprised Netflix, which only promoted its launch in South Korea and did not even offer press passes in the United States.
But the platform’s algorithm, which detects the most successful content in one region and powers it in others, brought this fiction to number one in more than 90 countries.
"It is a wild growth. We produce local content all over the world and we want it to have an impact in the countries where it is made, but every now and then one breaks all over the world.", analyzed Sarandos, when comparing the phenomenon of "The Squid Game" with titles in Spanish like "The Money Heist" and "Elite", who have stood up to the dominance of Hollywood.
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