How many hours was Squid Game watched in its first 28 days?

How to get close to this number

Multiply households by runtime. A global hit reaches on the order of a hundred million households, the series runs several hours end to end, and most viewers who start a hit of this size finish it. Households times completed runtime gives a figure in the billions of hours, which is the right scale.

The cost comparison in the explanation is the genuinely important number, not the viewing figure. The production cost a fraction of what an American drama of comparable ambition would, because it was made in a market with much lower production costs — and it outperformed everything made at many times the budget. Spend and reach are far less correlated in streaming than in traditional broadcast.

Treat the viewing metric with care. Hours viewed is a platform-defined measure the company chose to publish, and streaming services have changed their headline metrics several times — from two-minute views to completed views to hours — in ways that make historical comparison difficult. The number is real; the metric is the company's choice.