Viewership for Sunday’s MTV’s Video Music Awards fell dramatically for the second straight year, even as related action on social media soared. But what does MTV expect when they repeatedly produce a show designed primarily to create tweetable moments?
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The 2016 VMAs, which featured performances by top tier artists including Beyoncé, Rihanna and Britney Spears drew 6.5 million total viewers across MTV, VH1 and 9 Viacom-owned sister networks, according to Nielsen. That’s down 34% from last year’s telecast across the 11 channels.
Last year’s viewership was also down 3% from 2014, when the awards show was carried just on MTV, VH1 and MTV2.
Why Be Tied To TV, When You Can Catch The Highlights On Social Media?
The numbers looked dramatically different on social media.
According to MTV, the VMAs led to 62.8 million digital-video streams, up 70% from 2015. 90% of all TV related social media activity on Sunday night was VMA related and and were the top trending hashtag on Twitter for 13 hours. Facebook logged 45.8 million VMA related video streams.
Beyonce’s 15 minute performance of “Lemonade” has been 15 million times on Facebook, almost 3 times the number of those who saw it on TV.