About
What Rated to Watch is, and how it counts
An independent chart room for the three streaming services most people actually pay for — with the arithmetic shown rather than implied.
The idea
Every streaming service will tell you what is popular on it. Almost none will tell you how popular, against what, or measured how. Rated to Watch exists to publish one weekly page that answers those three questions for Netflix, HBO Max, and Prime Video at the same time, in the same shape, so the lists can be read side by side rather than taken on faith.
The site is deliberately small. There is one page of charts, refreshed weekly, and each title opens in place with a synopsis and its principal cast — no slideshows, no autoplaying trailers, and no bouncing you out to another site to find out what a show is about.
Where the numbers come from
Netflix’s lists are rebuilt every Monday from the view counts Netflix publishes itself for the previous week, merging its English and non-English charts into one Top 10. HBO Max and Prime Video publish no viewing data at all, so those two charts are pools chosen by our desk and re-ordered each week by English Wikipedia pageviews across a rolling seven-day window. That is a measure of how many people went looking for a title, not of how many watched it, and we would rather say so than dress it up as telemetry.
What the index means
The number beside each title is a positional index from 7.0 to 9.8, not a review score and not a rating out of ten. It is calculated on a logarithmic scale relative to the rest of that week’s list, because attention spans orders of magnitude: the week’s leader is often watched five or ten times more than the title at number ten. The index compresses that gap into something readable at a glance. It says where a title sits this week and nothing about whether it is any good.
Trends and streaks
The arrow beside a title compares this week’s position with the one we published last week, so a title can rise on the chart while its raw audience falls. Netflix rows carry the platform’s own count of cumulative weeks in the Top 10; for the other two platforms we count the weeks a title has held a place on our chart. Anything appearing for the first time is marked new.
Synopses, cast and artwork
Plot summaries and cast lists are adapted from English Wikipedia and used under CC BY-SA 4.0, with attribution shown alongside the text. Series key art comes from TVmaze. Film posters come from the relevant Wikipedia article and are reproduced at thumbnail size, as identification of the work being discussed. Editorial commentary, the platform notes and the ranking method are written by Rated to Watch.
Corrections
Charts are assembled automatically and titles occasionally resolve to the wrong record — a remake mistaken for an original, a season label attached to the wrong year. When our bot cannot verify that a title matches its source record with certainty, it leaves the previous week’s entry in place rather than guessing. If you spot something wrong anyway, tell us and we will fix it in the next run.
Platform by platform
Netflix
Netflix publishes weekly view counts for its global Top 10, so this chart is the platform’s own arithmetic: total views divided across the English and non-English lists, merged into a single ten.
Netflix is the only one of the three that shows its homework, and it shows a service that lives on volume. A thriller with a simple hook and a Christmas setting will out-watch a prestige drama by a factor of five, and the non-English lists routinely produce the week’s biggest number without ever reaching an English-language conversation. Read the top of this chart as a measure of reach, not of quality.
HBO Max
HBO Max releases no viewing figures. This chart is a pool chosen by the desk, ordered each week by how many people looked the titles up on Wikipedia — a proxy for attention rather than a count of plays.
HBO Max still behaves like a channel rather than a library: one show at a time carries the week, and its audience arrives on a schedule. That makes the ranking here unusually stable between Sundays, and unusually violent when a finale lands. Prestige titles hold their position for months after release, which is exactly what the platform is built to do.
Prime Video
Prime Video also publishes nothing. The pool is picked by the desk from the platform’s originals and headline licensed titles, then ordered weekly by Wikipedia interest.
Prime’s chart is the widest of the three, because the catalogue is the widest: a spy series, a superhero satire and a licensed action franchise can share a week without any of them being the reason someone subscribed. Its originals also have long tails — audiences find them late, and the ranking rewards that patience more than an opening weekend.
Who makes it
Rated to Watch is written and maintained by a small independent desk. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by Netflix, HBO Max, Prime Video, Wikipedia, or TVmaze; all trademarks belong to their respective owners.
A contact address is published here once the site's operator sets one for this deploy.
How the site is paid for
Rated to Watch is free to read and carries advertising supplied by Google AdSense. Ad slots are labelled, kept out of the chart itself, and never dressed up as editorial. Advertising has no influence on which titles appear or where they rank: the Netflix chart is Netflix's own published arithmetic, and the other two are ordered by a pageview measure no advertiser can buy into. Our privacy policy explains what that advertising collects and how to refuse it.