TV Ratings: VMAs Plummet on MTV, Sister Networks
MTV’s Video Music Awards may have been the talk of Twitter Sunday night, but the music show failed to draw a television audience on par with past installments.
The 2016 VMAs, featuring performances by Beyoncé, Rihanna and Britney Spears, among others, drew 6.5 million total viewers across MTV and 10 Viacom-owned sister networks, according to Nielsen live-plus-same day numbers. That’s down 34% from last year’s roadblock telecast across the same 11 channels.
Last year was the first in which the VMAs were carried on all Viacom’s cable channels. The 2015 version’s cumulative live-plus-same day audience was down 3% from the year prior, when the awards show was carried on MTV, VH1 and MTV2.
According to MTV, the event drew 62.8 million digital-video streams, up 70% from 2015. The VMAs also accounted for 90% of all TV-specific social media posts for the evening and were the top global trending hashtag on Twitter for 13 hours. The awards show also drew 45.8 million video streams on Facebook.
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