Netflix boss Ted Sarandos has fired a broadside at the media's obsession with television ratings reportage and said the streaming platform was not focused on audience size for individual programs.
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"Subscriber growth, not ratings, drives our revenue," Mr Sarandos told media at a new programming showcase in Los Angeles.
Tradition television ratings, he said "have no bearing on us."
Mr Sarandos acknowledged that the media was curious about who was watching Netflix's programs but said third-party data companies often reported conflicting data about the same titles.
He cited the US-produced women's prison drama Orange is the New Black as an example for which differing data was published by companies Nielsen and Symphony.
Nielsen reported 6.7 million US viewers tuned in during the programs first three-day streaming window.
Symphony reported the audience was 7.1 million.
"Either number would be great," Mr Sarandos told journalists at the twice-annual TCA programming showcase in Los Angeles.
Mr Sarandos also fielded questions about the service's softer-than-expected performance in the second quarter of 2016.
Netflix's share value took a hit when news broke this month that the service had added only 1.7 million new customers, below the forecast of 2.5 million new customers.
Netflix's total number of global subscribers exceeds 83 million.
Mr Sarandos said the issue was less about performance and more that they had not correctly predicted the evolving market.
"We grew much much faster than we expected in Q1 and slower than we expected in Q2," he said.
"It's a question of forecasting."
Mr Sarandos said the platform was "flying pretty blind" launching into new territories, which had complicated its ability to predict its performance.
In January, Netflix confirmed it would have launched in a total of 190 countries by the end of 2016.
He cited a number of factors impacting the service's softer-than-expected quarter.
"Multiple things ... [including] the price change, there are a lot of different conflicting things in the space we're trying to juggle."
Netflix recently confirmed the price of its subscriptions would rise in the US.
Other factors included more aggressive competition from US-based rivals such as Amazon and Hulu.
In January, Sarandos said the platform would spend $US6 billion ($7.99 billion) on original content in 2016.
He would not confirm the platform's 2017 content budget, but said: "It will go up."
"We're hitting where we said we would last year."