Netflix reveals huge viewing figures for You and Sex Education

While Netflix may have historically kept viewing numbers to themselves, the streaming service has decided to reveal the streaming figures for three of their TV series.

You, which premiered on the US network Lifetime before becoming a Netflix original, looks set to have been watched by 40 million subscribers by the 23 January.

The series Sex Education has also been an equally huge hit, with the Gillian Anderson-starring series on track to be watched by the same number of subscribers before its first month is out.

Elite, the Spanish teen drama that has proven a phenomenon around the world, attracted 20 million subscribers within its first four weeks on the service.

So, what exactly do these numbers mean? The streaming service told EW that view of a show only counts for them when an account watches 70 per cent of one episode. Netflix says that. while one account “may include multiple views and viewers,” it “is only counted once.”

By Netflix's metric, that means at least 40 million people will have watched 70 per cent of an episode of You by the end of its fourth week.

Last year, the film Bird Box broke records for Netflix, with over 45 million people watching the horror movie within its first week of release.

The Independent gave the film a withering two stars, with critic Geoffrey Macnab observing: “There have been countless other dystopian sci-fi dramas in which civilisation collapses and survivors try to hold their families together. Bird Box doesn’t take us anywhere we haven’t already been in these other movies.

“The plotting is sometimes very cumbersome. As the protagonists stumble through forests using fishing line to guide them, you begin to wish they would take off their blindfolds and simply look where they are going. The screenplay never really explains why the evil force (whatever it might be) causes some of those who stare at it to kill themselves while turning others into homicidal psychotics.”