Netflix has a lot fewer top-rated movies than it did 2 years ago

Netflix's US streaming catalog has shrunk by over 50% since 2012, but Netflix has always argued that the quality of the material keeps getting better.

In 2013, Netflix began producing original shows and movies, which were more expensive but gave subscribers something they couldn't get anywhere else.

"You can imagine that we could have a million low-quality videos that almost no one wants to watch and then say, hey, we have the largest catalog in the world," Netflix's Carlos Gomez-Uribe told Business Insider in a recent interview. "What matters is how many videos are people actually watching."

However, there's some evidence that Netflix is actually losing quality titles as it invests more in originals.

Here's one example: Netflix's selection of the top movies ever made, at least by IMDB ratings, has gone down in the last two years by a substantial amount.

In August 2014, a Reddit user tracked how many of IMDB's top 250 movies list were available to stream on Netflix. At the time, 49 were available, which is around 20% of the total. Streaming Observer, a blog that tracks the streaming industry, decided to revisit the list and see if it had changed. They found that in September, only 31 of those movies were available, or about 12% of the total.

Netflix has repeatedly says that its focus moving forward is on "exclusive" titles: either "originals" it makes itself, or shows and movies not available on other streaming services. Getting great movies is part of the goal, but it's also important that those classics aren't available on Amazon, Hulu, and so on. The goal is to get you hooked enough on Netflix to keep you paying that $9.99 per month.

Here are the IMDB top 250 movies that were available to stream on Netflix as of September, according to Streaming Observer:

1. Pulp Fiction
2. Forrest Gump
3. The Usual Suspects
4. Saving Private Ryan
5. Back to the Future
6. Gladiator
7. Sunset Boulevard
8. Cinema Paradiso
9. Django Unchained
10. The Shining
11. American Beauty
12. Reservoir Dogs
13. Braveheart
14. Amélie
15. To Kill a Mockingbird
16. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
17. Amadeus
18. The Hunt
19. Good Will Hunting
20. V for Vendetta
21. Trainspotting
22. No Country for Old Men
23. Into the Wild
24. There Will Be Blood
25. Spotlight
26. The Princess Bride
27. Zootopia
28. The Truman Show
29. Jaws
30. Ip Man
31. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

Netflix declined to comment.