Older viewers are more likely to watch Netflix originals

Ever since Netflix created House of Cards, the first streaming platform-produced TV series, the service has redefined how people watch TV. Releasing entire bingeable seasons at once is becoming the new norm, and the platform went on to release about 1,500 hours of original content last year.

While plenty of these shows and movies are geared toward younger audiences — take the recent chick flick “Something Great,” a breakup story featuring a diverse cast of millennials in NYC, or “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina,” a spooky spinoff of “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” — it turns out that Netflix’s older viewers spend more time watching the originals than younger subscribers do.

According to new research from Nielsen, originals made up 33% of the content viewed by subscribers aged 50 and up, and only 25% of the content viewed by users age 18 to 34.

“The younger you are, you’re seeing content on Netflix that you think might be a Netflix original,” Brian Fuhrer, SVP of product leadership at Nielsen, said at a New York press event this week.

In other words, the content that older viewers are likely already familiar with, like all 10 seasons of “Friends” or the original “Grace and Frankie” episodes, is new material for younger viewers. Older viewers are looking for things they haven’t seen before, like the new dark comedy “Dead to Me.”

The good news for viewers of any age is that with a budget of roughly $15 billion to spend on original content, it doesn’t look like Netflix will slow down production anytime soon.

And with subjects ranging from the Ted Bundy story to recreations of obscure comic books to feel-good rom-coms, there’s something for fans of every genre.