Why Giving Ratings Matters: The 3 Key Advantages for Your Favorite Series

Key Takeaways

• Rate shows and movies to improve the streaming service experience and personalized content recommendations.
• Direct ratings provide more accurate data for streaming services compared to watch history and other metrics.
• Rating shows can help save them from cancelation and improve the chances of discovering new content.

Most streaming services have a system where you can rate how much you liked or disliked a show or movie, but I bet most people don’t bother taking the time. Well, I’m here to tell you that if you do rate everything you watch, you’ll actually improve your streaming service experience significantly.

Streaming Services Won’t Have to Guess How You Feel

With traditional broadcast TV, ratings for shows work by polling a sample of viewers to get an idea of how different groups of people feel about a particular show. This is a reasonable way to get a good idea of how well your programs are doing, but with on-demand streaming, things are taken to the next level. You can directly tell the service providing you with entertainment whether you think the show or movie they made is good or not.

More importantly, this lets you provide the streaming service with a personal profile of who you are and what specific mix of things you like. This means that your tastes can guide how future content is made, or what content the streaming service will license next. The more complete the picture the service has of your tastes, the more likely it can cater to you in particular.

You’re Curating Content

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By taking the time to rate shows and movies, you’re also curating content for your own benefit. Just like streaming music platforms will help you discover music that’s right up your alley, telling Netflix or Hulu what you think sucked or was the best thing you’ve ever seen makes it more likely you’ll be recommended something awesome.

These streaming services have absolutely enormous libraries of content. You can never even get through the stuff that you’d like, so it’s a true challenge to figure out what to recommend.

If you don’t explicitly rate everything, then other metrics have to be used. While no one outside these companies knows the secret sauce of their algorithms, I suspect they have to use your watch history along with details such as whether you watched all episodes, whether you stopped watching quickly, or if you binged a show. This can still help them home in on what you like, but it’s not going to be as accurate as direct ratings.

It Could Save Your Favorite Shows From Cancelation.

When streaming services started making their own content, it was awesome for a while, but then plenty of the shows I loved were suddenly canceled. With direct access to data about who’s watching what and for how long, streaming services can make decisions to cancel a show quickly and decisively. If you (and everyone else) had taken the time to directly tell the platform that you love a show, then it might make it less likely for that program to get the chop when it deserved to live on.

Don’t Just Rate Stuff You’ve Streamed

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It’s not a lot of effort to rate a program right after you’ve finished watching it, but if you want to make things even better, you should take the time to rate your favorite shows and movies from before streaming even existed.

Streaming services necessarily have mostly older content, so the movies and shows that you’ve loved over the course of your life will likely be there to some extent. Since these services let you rate things without watching them first, you can take fifteen minutes of your time and look up your top ten or twenty movies and rate them. Likewise, look up some things you’ve watched that you really dislike, and rate them negatively.

In my experience, this almost immediately cleans up the recommendations you get, and it’s helped me find new shows that might be niche, but happen to be exactly what I was looking for.

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