VMA TV Ratings Continue To Drop As MTV Focuses On Social Successes
The MTV Video Music Awards continue to fade as a linear TV franchise while making inroads elsewhere.
On TV, 6.5 million viewers watched last night’s orgy of performances, antics and awards dispensing across 11 Viacom networks including MTV, MTV2, MTV Classic, VH1, Comedy Central, Spike, TV Land, BET, CMT, Centric and Logo. That’s a steep slide from the 2015 VMAs, which had snared 9.8 million total viewers across 10 Viacom networks – which, in turn, was down from previous year’s 10.3M.
This afternoon, MTV focused on the 62.8M video streams the VMAs clocked. The network boasted that tally was up 70% from day-of-show’s 36.8M in 2015. Beyonce’s exuberant/exhausting performance drove the growth, MTV said, without mentioning Kanye West’s speech in which he revealed his role models to include Harry Truman, Howard Hughes, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs and himself. The 2016 VMAs also drew 45.8 million streams on Facebook, up 938% (4.4M) over the 2015 show.
The 2016 VMAs was the No. 1 most social show of the night, making up 90% of all TV-related social media chatter for the evening. #VMAs was the No. 1 global trending hashtag on Twitter for 13 hours on the day of show.
For comparison sake, last year MTV bragged about the VMAs being the most tweeted non-sports program since Nielsen Social began tracking Twitter TV activity, generating 21.4 million tweets, which reached 11.8 million people. Additionally, 16 million people had 39 million Facebook interactions related to the VMAs on day-of, MTV said last August, the day after the event. MTV also drew reporters’ attention to the show having generated 19.1 million streams at the point it issued its report – up 155% over the same time period for the 2014 trophy show.
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