Canada leads the world in true crime viewership on Netflix, according to recent research by Digital i.
New data, first presented by media consultant Beatrice Rossmanith at Series Mania Forum last week, shows that 60.7% of Canadian Netflix subscribers watched at least 20 minutes of a true crime title in 2024.
Australia came in second place, with 56.5% of Netflix subscribers there watching a true crime title, followed by Colombia, where the genre was watched by 54.5% of subscribers in the same period.
At the furthest end of the scale was Japan, where only 11.2% of Netflix subscribers watched the genre in 2024.
Digital i measures Netflix audience data in the U.S., Canada, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, The Netherlands, Poland, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Australia, South Korea and Japan.
The UK scripted series Baby Reindeer was the true crime title with the highest reach on Netflix last year, according to Digital i research, viewed by 70 million accounts across those countries.
The US scripted anthology series Monsters was in second place last year with a reach of 61 million accounts, with the non-scripted American Nightmare in third position, reaching 53 million accounts.
On the purely non-scripted side, audience interest in Netflix true crime content has been growing steadily for years. Digital i data shows that six of the top 20 documentary titles (ranked by reach) were true crime docs in 2020, compared to 15 titles in 2024.
