Todd Yellin is pretty sure his wife would have never watched Jessica Jones if he hadn't tricked her. She's not a fan of shows based on comic books, and even though he's a Netflix exec, nepotism wouldn't have been enough to make her tune in. Yet he knew she'd love it. So Yellin did what Netflix often does to woo users: He played to her interests by mentioning the strong female lead and rave reviews.

It worked. They were three episodes in before she noticed the Marvel logo that opens the show, but by that point she was hooked.

As Netflix’s VP of product, figuring out what people like is Yellin's job—and that often means spending a lot of time with data scientists and machine learning engineers. But his efforts to parse the data coming from the The Defenders, which brings the superheroes Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, and Daredevil together to defend New York, started at home. “The unique opportunity The Defenders gives us is because of the team-up thing,” Yellin says. “My wife wouldn’t watch Iron Fist or Daredevil. But because she likes Jessica Jones should we suggest Defenders to her?”

More importantly, should Netflix suggest a show like The Defenders to you?

The Defenders provides Netflix with a unique case study. Instead of merely allowing it to find out if someone who likes, say, House of Cards also will like Daredevil (yes, BTW), it tells them which of the people who landed on Daredevil because of House of Cards will make the jump to The Defenders. Yellin’s wife enjoyed Jessica Jones because she likes female protagonists. Will that apply to a show where her beloved character is part of an ensemble? Will future crossover shows draw viewers? And, if so, which viewers should Netflix target? Those are just a few of the questions Yellin hopes to answer with data from The Defenders.

Netflix

Wildly different programs lead people to The Defenders’ standalone shows. The top lead-in show for Luke Cage? Narcos. But for Iron Fist, it’s a Dave Chappelle special. Someone who watches Jones probably will watch Cage, but beyond that the groups of people—Netflix calls them "taste communities"—gravitating toward those shows enjoy very different programming. “Take someone like my 75-year-old mother-in-law, who enjoys Grace and Frankie. Are we going to necessarily suggest Iron Fist to her? Absolutely not. But there is going to be a subset of people it appeals to, so we have to get smart about which people,” Yellin says. “So when something like The Defenders comes out, we’ll look at what percent of people we showed it to actually clicked play, what percent of people had to go and look for it when we should’ve presented it on their homepage at the top.”