Netflix ‘clustering’ tailored to each viewer by choices

NEW YORK — Netflix wants subscribers to know that it’s looking out for them.

For instance, the average Netflix subscriber might never guess that its dark superhero drama “Jessica Jones” might strike similar chords as the zany hijinks of “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.”

Netflix is happy to help you make the connection.

Much of the attention showered on the streaming-video giant in recent years has dwelled on its insatiable appetite for original content and for creators to produce it.

“We want to appeal to as many different people as possible and appeal to the many moods that each person has,” said Todd Yellin, vice president of product innovation.

“The more diverse our content, the more likely that someone, at their moment of truth about what they’re going to watch, will choose to go to Netflix.”

But Netflix’s multibillion-dollar annual outlay for new programming necessitates another challenge: helping each program get discovered by the subscribers most likely to enjoy it.

Four of every five of the shows watched on Netflix are discovered by subscribers through recommendations offered them, Netflix says.

Those suggested new favorites are much more customized for each subscriber than might be evident from a glance at the home page of the service.

Most every row of program suggestions (even generic-seeming categories such as “Comedies” and “Dramas”), Yellin said, is tailored for each subscriber.

And how the rows are arranged vertically on the home page is a function of the subscriber’s demonstrated genre preferences.

So your Netflix differs from everyone else’s.

But where do these tips come from?

First, a legion of Netflix “taggers” screens every program, tagging different elements that compose it. That data is crunched and continuously refined by the company’s secret algorithm. And then viewer habits gathered by Netflix from its 100 million accounts worldwide add more grist to the mill.

Thus can Netflix take a “gateway” program and point the person watching it to other unexpected or unknown fare with presumably similar appeal?

Consider “Ozark,” to which viewers might be led from any of several directions, Yellin explained.

“Ozark” is a recently released original drama series starring Jason Bateman as a moneylaundering family man who’s seriously jammed up with the Mexican drug cartel for which he works.

“We’ve found that people who tend to watch ‘ Blacklist’ and ‘House of Cards’ tend to like ‘ Ozark,’” Yellin said. “But another kind of person who will find he likes ‘ Ozark’ is a fan of ‘ Narcos’ and ‘ El Chapo’ and other drugcarteloriented dramas and documentaries.

“It’s not like we could have guessed this ahead of time,” he continued. “We just track which shows tend to cluster together.

“Who would have thought that ‘ Jessica Jones’ and ‘Kimmy Schmidt’ would cluster together?” As well as — no kidding — “Making a Murderer” and a John Mulaney stand-up concert.