Netflix has been around since 1997. Founded by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph, its business mostly involves providing a subscription-based streaming service that offers online streaming from a library of films and television series, including those produced in-house.
And here, the scripted miniseries 'The Queen’s Gambit' that tells the story of a young girl with an astonishing talent for chess, becomes "our biggest limited scripted series ever" in 23 years of its existence.
According to the company, the miniseries that star American-Argentine-British actress Anya Taylor-Joy got more than 62 million Netflix users tuning it to the show in the first 28 days.
It should be noted though, that Netflix’s algorithm and methodology in counting views is based on the number of viewers who have watched a piece of content for at least 2 minutes. What this means, if one Netflix subscribers just watched the first episode for at least 2 minutes, Netflix counted the person to have viewed the series.
Meanwhile at this time, season one of 'The Witcher' is the most viewed original series on Netflix, after gaining 76 million subscribers in 28 days.
According to Netflix on a post on its website, since launching The Queen's Gambit in October:
- The Queen’s Gambit novel becomes The New York Times bestseller list, 37 years after its release.
- Google Search queries for chess have doubled while searches for “how to play chess” have hit a nine-year peak.
- Inquiries for ‘chess sets’ on eBay are up 250% and Goliath Games said that its chess sales have increased over 170%.
- The number of new players has increased five fold on Chess.com.
Netflix also boasted about the success of “The Queen’s Gambit,” saying how the miniseries generated "rave reviews and a rare 100%" on Rotten Tomatoes, a popular review-aggregation website.
Netflix added that the miniseries have made the Top 10 in 92 countries and ranked number 1 in 63 countries, including the UK, Argentina, Israel and South Africa.
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