Was Tucker Carlson’s New Twitter Show Actually Watched By 114 Million People?

In the wake of his abrupt ouster from Fox News, Tucker Carlson didn’t take a break. The former cable news veteran, undeterred by Fox’s attempts to keep him to his contract and off the air, quickly launched a new show on Twitter. He has dropped two episodes so far, which fans have celebrated as a triumphant return — touting that he now has an audience far bigger than the one he had on cable.

But how does his new audience really stack up against cable news?

Carlson was fired from his top rated Fox News show back in April. His defenestration, the result of a series of missteps that included offensive private texts and on-air coverage that regularly defied reality, left a gaping hole in Fox’s prime time lineup, which has sunk in the ratings in the weeks since.

Carlson debuted his new show, “Tucker on Twitter,” Tuesday of last week. The first episode drew what sound like monster stats: as of writing, Twitter says 114 million people have seen the 10-minute monologue in which Carlson rants about Ukraine and calls its Jewish president “sweaty and rat-like” and “a persecutor of Christians.”

His second episode, which dropped on Thursday, is already up to 54 million views (more than the entire population of South Korea).

The astonishing view count has prompted much celebration from Carlson and Musk’s fans, who stack those stats up against the apparently paltry ratings of cable news.

“CNN is lucky to get 500,000 viewers on a show,” crowed Carlson’s biographer Chadwick Moore. “Tucker’s video got 90 million, and counting—compared to his 3.5 million average on the dead and irrelevant medium of cable.”

“Fox News is screwing themselves,” declared radio host Jimmy Dore. “And legacy media is over.”

But there is little comparison between tweet views and cable news ratings.

First, let’s start with Carlson’s new Twitter show. Did one third of the United States watch Carlson’s first episode? Not exactly.

Musk has made a big push to show off the “tweet view” metric of posts on his platform, adding it to the interface. Now you can see how many people have viewed each tweet on the site. Last month, he hid the “video view” metric, which showed how many people watched a video on Twitter. Even the video view metric was pretty flimsy: according to Twitter, if you watch a video for two seconds, with only half the video player in-view, you count as one video view.

The tweet view metric is even less valuable. It merely counts how many people viewed the tweet, so if you scrolled past Carlson’s video on Twitter, you counted as one of the 114 million. “Anyone who is logged into Twitter who views a Tweet counts as a view,” Twitter says. If you scrolled past the tweet multiple times, you counted more than once.

Presumably, a small fraction of that big number watched even part of the clip. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment on the video’s metrics.

Let’s compare that to cable news. When Musk’s boosters mock the 3.5 million that Carlson used to draw on his nightly Fox News show, they are referring to a metric from Nielsen that measures the average concurrent viewers of a program. If an average of 3.5 million people watched an episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News, the peak of concurrents is even higher, and the total viewership would be millions more.

As Steve Hasker, the former president of Nielsen who now serves as CEO of Thomson Reuters, explained in 2015: “In TV, the standard measurement unit for viewership is the average-minute audience — how many viewers there are in an average minute of content. In the digital space, on the other hand, video measurement is commonly expressed as the gross number of times the video is viewed, even if only for one minute or one second. These two metrics are quite different, and comparing one to the other unfairly tilts the comparison against TV.”

Nielsen does have a metric to measure total audience, called cumulative viewership. As Brian Stelter noted in the New York Times recently, Fox News drew a total audience of 63 million in the first quarter of 2023. CNN drew 68 million.

So no, 114 million people did not watch Carlson’s new show on Twitter. The tweets have certainly drawn a lot of eyeballs, but those metrics are simply not comparable to cable news ratings, which belie the total audience — and enduring influence — of the television industry.

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