January 25, 2023
'VMA' Viewership Down, Digital Watching Up
- by Wayne Friedman , August 31, 2015
One of Viacom’s single biggest TV shows of the year, “MTV’s Video Music Awards” earned slightly lower traditional TV viewing numbers -- but much higher digital
streaming viewing data. Sunday night’s “MTV Video Music Awards” pulled in a Nielsen 9.8 million viewers, which aired live across 10 Viacom networks.
Numbers were down 5% from a year ago, when the annual awards event pulled in 10.3 million viewers for MTV, MTV2, VH1 and Logo TV. Last year’s “VMAs” took in 8.3 million viewers on MTV.
But when it came to digital streaming, the awards show racked up major gains: 19.1 million streams, for an increase of 155%. Other digital data: 21.4 million tweets, with a unique audience of 11.8 million, and 2.2 unique authors; and 39 million Facebook engagements.
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MTV added that the “VMAs” are now the No. 1 show of the year among 12- to-24-year-olds.
The best traditional TV viewing numbers came in 2011 when the “VMAs” took in 12.4 million viewers. Before that, the best performance was in 2002, drawing an audience of 11.95 million.
In terms of competition on Sunday, AMC’s “Fear the Walking Dead” earned 8.2 million viewers for its second episode -- down 20% from its total viewer score for its series premiere episode a week before.
The most-viewed show on broadcast TV was CBS’ “60 Minutes,” with 8.4 million viewers, followed by CBS’ “Big Brother” at 6.7 million viewers and NBC’s “NFL Preseason Football” with 6.5 million.
Pretty scary that they are comparing a TV rating - which represents the average audience per minute of broadcast over the total duration - with stream counts, tweets, FB engagements etc. Let's start counting how many clicks on the TV remote then.