Netflix Inc. is changing how it measures viewership of its content, a move that the streaming company said will provide more clarity when it comes to judging the popularity of programming on its platform.

Starting Tuesday, Netflix will now rank its titles by the total number of hours viewed, the company said. Previously, Netflix measured a program’s viewership based on the number of subscribers who watch at least two minutes of it, an approach that critics felt was too low a bar to measure the popularity of a program.

The...

Netflix Inc. is changing how it measures viewership of its content, a move that the streaming company said will provide more clarity when it comes to judging the popularity of programming on its platform.

Starting Tuesday, Netflix will now rank its titles by the total number of hours viewed, the company said. Previously, Netflix measured a program’s viewership based on the number of subscribers who watch at least two minutes of it, an approach that critics felt was too low a bar to measure the popularity of a program.

The streaming service also said it would release viewership data weekly. Such information used to be primarily released during Netflix’s quarterly earnings reports.

The move comes as a response to criticism that Netflix isn’t transparent enough with consumers, investors and its own producers when it comes to providing viewership information. Netflix has often said that because it doesn’t sell advertisements in its programming, it doesn’t need to be tied to the traditional measurement standards of commercial television.

With the streaming landscape becoming increasingly cluttered, Netflix is now competing for viewers and creative talent with deep-pocketed competitors including Walt Disney Co. , Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.

Netflix said that between Nov. 8 and Nov. 14, its most-watched film was “Red Notice,” a movie starring Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot and Ryan Reynolds that garnered 148.7 million hours of viewing since Friday, when it was released on the streaming service. The most popular TV show that week was “Narcos: Mexico,” with 50.3 million hours viewed, Netflix said.

Netflix alluded to past criticism of its measurement metrics in a company blog post announcing the change written by Pablo Perez De Rosso, the company’s vice president of content strategy, planning and analysis.

‘Squid Game,’ released in September, was a huge hit for Netflix.

Photo: Wang Yiliang/Zuma Press

“Nonsense. BS. Cherry Picked. Unaudited. We’ve had a lot of feedback about our metrics over the years. So this summer, we went back to the drawing board,” Mr. Perez De Rosso wrote. The hours consumed approach, he said, will better reflect not only popularity, but also “overall member satisfaction, which is important for retention in subscription services.”

The company had telegraphed the change in its third-quarter letter to shareholders last month, when it said “engagement as measured by hours viewed is a slightly better indicator of the overall success of our titles and member satisfaction.”

The rankings will also be on the home page of Netflix, a move the streamer hopes will serve as a word-of-mouth form of promotion. Netflix said it has retained the accounting firm EY to review the new metrics and issue a report on their effect, which will be published next year.

What the new approach won’t include is how many subscribers watched a particular piece of content.

The two-minute methodology and its predecessor—which reported viewing of a title based on 70% consumption of a movie or an episode of a series—both provided the number of subscriber homes.

Netflix said it would publish four weekly global top-10 lists of films and TV in English and non-English languages ranked by hours viewing per-title. It will also release top-10 lists for more than 90 countries.

“This is an important step forward for Netflix, the creators we work with and our members,” Mr. Perez De Rosso wrote. “People want to understand what success means in a streaming world, and these lists offer the clearest answer to that question in our industry.”

Write to Joe Flint at joe.flint@wsj.com