Netflix announced today that it would ditch its standard five-star rating scheme in favor of a much more simple thumbs up or down option.
The streaming service said it had been testing thumbs up and down ratings “with hundreds of thousands of members” in 2016 – and it led to 200% more ratings being given.
This makes sense – giving a five-star rating takes some thought, especially for something like a movie or TV show.
A binary “yes or no” option is much easier for viewers to commit to, especially in a world where we’ve been trained to nonchalantly throw likes around on Instagram and Facebook. So this change should mean that Netflix viewers will rate more shows more often – resulting in more data for Netflix.
Netflix also announced that some of this data will be used for a new percent-match feature – designed to indicate how good of a match a show or movie is for you. So if Netflix thinks you’ll really like a show you could see a 95% or even 100% match. It’s almost like a Rotten Tomatoes rating customized for your liking.
The company also shared some interesting stats surrounding ratings – at one point more than 50% of all members had rated more than 50 different titles on Netflix, including over 10 billion total 5-star ratings.
The changes will roll out within the next month or so for users globally.
