Everyone's in the dark when it comes to Netflix's "House of Cards" ratings, including lead actor Kevin Spacey.
Last week, Netflix rolled out all 13 episodes of the political drama on its streaming site at once and since then the big question is how many people are tuning into watch.
Though Netflix's Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos won't divulge on the specifics, he revealed during All Things D's Dive Into Media conference that its new original series is currently the most-watched thing on the site in all 40 countries where it operates.
To clarify, Sarandos defines "most-watched" in terms of the number of people viewing and the number of hours they're engaging with the program.
When All Things D pushed for metric data, he refused to give away any numbers.
Sarandos explained he refuses to deliver ratings because he sees it as an apples-to-orange comparison with network ratings.
"If I come out to you and say that we attracted more viewers than a show on another network then that's bad news for them, and not particularly good news for me because I don't monetize it in any way," he said. "I don't sell advertising, I'm not jockeying for a position with cable operators."
However, you would think that the star of the show, Spacey, must want to know how many eyeballs are watching his performance as conniving congressman Francis Underwood.
If so, that's too bad, because according to Sarandos, he's in the dark, too.
"I don't tell him," says Sarandos. "I tell him that we're thrilled. He says, 'Are you happy with the numbers?' I tell him we're thrilled with the numbers in absolute and relative to what we expected."
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