The Untold Truth Of Netflix

As you'd expect for a company with thousands of films in its archives, Netflix meticulously catalogs every film in its library. Unlike us peons, though, who are happy enough dividing films by their genre or how much nudity they contain, Netflix takes everything into account when it adds a new film or TV show to its library.

Netflix's proprietary algorithm sorts films based on everything from historical settings to whether or not it contains vampires, allowing them to cater to almost ludicrously specific tastes. As an example of how laser-like the focus of Netflix's genre algorithm is, for an April Fool's joke they once suggested users check out "Movies Featuring an Epic Nic Cage Meltdown." Which may as well have just been a list of every Nic Cage film, but you get the idea.

In 2014, a curious statistician worked through the code of Netflix and found the site has over 75,000 different "micro-genres" that it uses to categorize movies and shows (76,897 to be more precise). For example, 4082 leads to "Action & Adventure based on a book from the 1960s" while 45028 means "Deep Sea Horror Movies." Netflix isn't forthright about the codes, but they're easily and directly accessible when using Netflix with a web browser. Type in "" into the navigation bar, and then type in a random three-, four- or five-digit number and just see what happens.