Wall Street is concerned that Netflix has an engagement problem, a problem that can be seen in the viewing figures that the streaming giant regularly releases.

No problem, says Netflix: it will fix that problem… by releasing viewership numbers less frequently.

Netflix says it will stop publishing its “What We Watched” report, a voluminous data dump that details viewership for thousands of individual shows and movies, twice a year, as it has been doing since December 2023, and just did so on Thursday.

Instead, it will provide the information once a year.

Because? The company is relatively candid about this in the letter to investors it published Thursday afternoon: It wants Wall Street to stop focusing on the performance of its shows and movies.

“The goal of separating the release of the report from our earnings results is to maintain focus on our core financial metrics: revenue and operating profit,” the company said.

The flip side of that argument: If Netflix felt good about its engagement numbers, it would share them more frequently.

If you’re a close Netflix watcher, this move will look familiar. In April 2024, Netflix announced that it would no longer publish subscriber data each quarter. And he used similar reasoning: He wanted Wall Street to stop paying attention to subscriber data and focus on other metrics.

Here, it is important to note that Netflix is ​​not required to publish any of the data sets. And that many of its competitors – including YouTube, its most formidable enemy – provide very little data about their services.

So while the company has become significantly less transparent in recent years, it still leads its peers by a long shot. And while part of the impetus for releasing viewership numbers is to impress Wall Street, that’s not the only reason. Netflix also uses those numbers to court Hollywood talent who fear their shows and movies will be lost among all the service’s offerings.

But the most important context here is the obvious: Netflix has been taking heat from analysts and investors for worrying trends evident from the data it’s been publishing. The main one: Netflix subscribers seem to spend less time with Netflix content than in the past.

And this month, Bloomberg highlighted that problem, using data directly from Netflix, with a report that showed some of Netflix’s biggest shows are seeing a sharp decline in their second seasons.

Netflix has multiple answers to those concerned about engagement. He says his participation numbers are really good, for starters. And on the company’s earnings call Thursday, co-CEO Ted Sarandos insisted that the company’s second season declines are much smaller than those of its peers, for example.

More broadly, the company has been arguing for some time that “quality of engagement” matters more than simple tonnage. “As we have developed an increasingly sophisticated understanding of how consumers attribute value to our service, we know that not all hours are equal,” the company said in its letter to investors.

Still, it’s safe to say that Netflix is ​​pretty sensitive about the issue of commitment: The word “commitment” appears 13 times in Thursday’s letter to investors.

I don’t know if Wall Street will care about any of this. For years, investors obsessed over Netflix’s subscriber count, to the point that everyone else in the streaming wars went out of their way to boast about it. his subscriber numbers. Then Netflix moved on and investors seemed to move on too.

But in the last year, Netflix stock has performed miserably, falling 40%. A big part of that drop came from investors who were concerned about Netflix’s plan to buy Warner Bros. Discovery for $83 billion, partly because they didn’t like the idea of ​​Netflix shelling out so much cash and going into debt, and partly because of the suggestion that Netflix felt it needed to spend so much to drive growth again.

But while Netflix ended up walking away from that deal, it didn’t solve its stock problem. Maybe this will help.