Game of Thrones It’s not a Netflix series, but it did play a role in creating the iconic “Skip Intro” button that has become one of the streaming platform’s biggest hits.
I’m not exaggerating. The “Skip Intro” button is pressed an average of 136 million times a day, says Netflix. Users who rely on it to skip the opening sequence of a series save a cumulative total of 195 years each day. Too much time for some initial credits that we have already seen other times or they take forever if we come from a cliffhanger in the previous episode.
It is true that some intros are works of art in themselves, like the one of the own Game of Thrones, with its epic orchestra and those details that change as the series progresses. But for the most impatient they become unbearably long when the important thing is to know what happens in the plot.
That’s exactly what inspired Cameron Johnson, director of product innovation at Netflix, when he and his team created the “Skip Intro” button.
In 2016, Johnson was hooked on Game of Thrones (like everyone). But the intro was too long for her and she used to manually skip it to go straight to the episode. However, the experience was frustrating. Sometimes it went too far and sometimes it fell short. And he wondered if other people had similar experiences.
His team found that roughly 15% of Netflix users manually fast-forwarded a series within the first five minutes of an episode, suggesting that many people would want to skip the intro.
At the time, Netflix was working on a 10-second forward and back button, but decided to try something better: a button to skip the opening sequence. of 250 series, the famous “Skip Intro”. The button appears on the screen only when necessary and works with a single click (or if you press the “s” on the keyboard).
It was an overwhelming success. Although it was initially launched on the web, and only in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada, it ended up reaching televisions in 2017 and the Netflix application in 2018, as well as the vast majority of series. In the words of a Netflix engineer: “I don’t know if a button that said ‘free cupcake’ would get more clicks than Skip Intro.”