As a college student, I am the target audience for Netflix, the incredibly popular movie and TV streaming site. Netflix used to be a service from which people could rent DVD’s, but since 2007, when they launched their instant streaming service, their popularity has surged.Business Insider reports that the average account watches 18 minutes of streaming per day. With a total subscriber base of 40.4 million, that is a total of 727,200,000 minutes streamed per day, or roughly 34,628,571 episodes of “The Office”, one of the most popular shows on Netflix. This instant service is dangerous, though, because any time that I could be doing work, I also have the option to waste endless amounts of time. In this blog I will investigate the amount of time that college students spend on Netflix, and what that time could have been used for otherwise.
In an article for The Daily Toreador, Texas Tech’s university newspaper, a study done by Geoffrey Graybeal, a professor in the College of Media and Communications at Texas Tech reported that 9 out of 10 students admitted to watching Netflix, among other things shown in the graphic below.
The study is self reported, but shows reliable data which reflects the total usage of Netflix. I did an independent study on my floor of Tener Hall, and found that 14 out of the 16 people that live on my floor watched Netflix, which is roughly the same percentage (87.5%).
This study introduces the issue of binge watching, which is considered to be watching three or more episodes of a single show in a row. I also asked my floor-mates how many episodes of Netflix they generally watched in a row, and the average number was just above 4. When you multiply that out to the length of “The Office” again, a show which I will be using throughout this blog as a reference, it equals an hour and 24 minutes. This is time that could have been used to do any number of things, including studying, working on homework assignment, or even doing blog posts. The study that I conducted showed the massive time suck that Netflix creates.
After I saw this data, I was shocked. I never realized what large harm watching just a few episodes could do. So, instead of standing idly by and letting myself waste my time, I decided to track all my activities for an entire week, and see what took up most of my time. From Monday, November 9th until Friday the 13th I tracked my activities, and here were my results: I spent 15 hours and 10 minutes in classes, had 5 hours of music rehearsals for my a cappella group, spent 4 hours watching terrestrial TV (one Eagles game), spent a total of 4 hours working on Econ homework, 5 on English work, 5 on work for this class, and an amazing 10 hours watching Netflix. With all that time, I could have tripled the work I did for this class, and knocked out several blog posts. If I had chosen this path, I could have avoided the stress of having blogs to write at the end of the period. Now, with Thanksgiving week approaching, I will have to do work over the break. I could have avoided this completely if it were not for my procrastination through Netflix.
My story is not an anomaly, though. While ten hours of Netflix may seem excessive, it is actually relatively normal for a college student. In a poll done on an anonymous college campus for Prowl Magazine , 100 randomly selected students were asked how much Netflix they watch weekly, and here are the results, “12 percent reported spending two hours or less per week on Netflix, 71 percent reported between two and 10 hours per week, and 17 percent said they spent more than 10 hours a week on Netflix”. This puts my experience on the top of the majority, but within the majority none the less. This confirms a photo that I saw on Facebook the other day that sums up my experience pretty well. 
This seems to be the norm for most college students, and there is a lot of stress that it does create. Penn State has a statistic on expected workload for students:
“To determine the number of credits to be scheduled in a semester or session, it may be helpful to estimate the academic work load required. This can be accomplished by multiplying the number of credits the student wants to schedule by the forty hours of work which may be required (see Definition of a Credit, above). This total is then divided by the number of weeks in the semester or session of enrollment.
e.g.: 15 credits x 40 hours of work per credit = 600 hours of work
600 hours ÷ 15 weeks = 40 hours of work per week during the semester”
15 credits is a standard number for students here at Penn State, and if 10 hours is around the average for how much Netflix a student watches, 1/4 of a student’s workload could be knocked out in the time that they are wasting by watching Netflix. I urge you to think about this blog post the next time you see the “Continue Watching?” button pop up. I promise you, there are much better things you could be doing with your time.
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I know that you have a point. People spend a lot of time on Netflix. However, I think that the first survey is probably skewed. I think it is likely that self reporting Netflix could result in more people saying they do than reality. I feel like Netflix is such a social norm and phenomena that people in our age group are less likely to admit they do not watch it. Also, I’m not sure using the University’s guidelines for course work are the best source to cite. I think you’d find most students do not agree with those estimates.
This is truly an awesome blog! It’s really cool to see the affects on Netflix around you as we are all college students and we all love to “binge” watch our Netflix, especially once a week on the rainy days when we don’t want to do anything but be in bed. I think it is intriguing when your wrote that it seems like ten hours of Netflix would be too much, but it is average for a college student, it is crazy to know that 71% of us watch that much Netflix. If we spent as much time studying as we did on Netflix, we would probably all have better test scores. Netflix cures all always seems to be true. Interesting post, well written too!
I admire the work you did for this blog! It’s also very interesting and relevant to your readers. My only concern is the accuracy of the data just because it was self-reported. If there was actual evidence to show the amount of hours one spent on Netflix it would be more accurate in my opinion. And secondly, being on Netflix can be considered a waste of time but in a large part of the blog it’s seems as though anything other than Netflix is good. Some people could watch Netflix instead of doing drugs.