When Tucker Carlson announced his plan to relaunch his show on Twitter, I was skeptical. As I noted at the time, roughly 97% of households have at least one television, compared to the 23% of American adults who use Twitter. Twitter may be a popular platform, but it still pales in comparison to YouTube, Facebook, or even Instagram, which are used by 81%, 69%, and 40% of adults respectively.
Twitter has the potential to reach huge numbers of people, such as when DeSantis launched his presidential campaign on Twitter Spaces, but even that event was plagued by glitches. Elon Musk has big plans for Twitter, but currently, the platform’s limited reach and growing pains give traditional news media a huge advantage in shaping the narrative and disseminating news to a large audience. DeSantis’s campaign launch may have been a success, but the mainstream media reached more people with the narrative that it was a glitch-plagued disaster.
So, how is Twitter working out for Tucker Carlson? Let’s look at the numbers. Here are the stats for each episode of Tucker’s Twitter show, with air dates:
- 120 million views (6/6/23)
- 60.4 million views (6/8/23)
- 103 million views (6/13/23)
- 32.2 million views (6/15/23)
- 17 million views (6/20/23)
- 31.5 million views (6/22/23)
- 14.3 million views (6/27/23)
- 6.6 million views (7/1/23)
At face value, these numbers are impressive, yet they’re also incredibly inconsistent. The second episode’s viewership dropped by half, the first and third episodes are the only ones with over 100 million views, and the views are trending downward. They’re still incredible numbers, though — the views of the first episode are equivalent to a third of the population of the United States. That sounds amazing.
But how exactly do these numbers really compare to cable viewership?
Last month, Mediate sought to answer that question, and noted how Twitter’s view metrics are, well, kind of garbage. Why? Because “it merely counts how many people viewed the tweet,” meaning that if you scrolled past Carlson’s video on your Twitter timeline, that counts as a view.
“Anyone who is logged into Twitter who views a Tweet counts as a view,” Twitter explained. So, that means every time you scroll past the tweet in your timeline, it counts. How many of those view counts represent users who watched the entire clip? Probably a fraction.
Related: Tucker Carlson Makes Chilling Prediction About 2024
So, while Tucker’s videos have certainly been seen by many, that audience is still likely a fraction of those who were tuning in to see him on Fox News. And seeing as how his numbers are trending downward on Twitter, there’s reason to doubt the sustainability of his Twitter-exclusive content.
So, what does this mean? It means that it is inevitable that Twitter won’t be Tucker’s permanent home in the wake of his ouster from Fox News. Carlson hasn’t signed any contracts with Twitter, and he could leave at any time. But when we consider the reality of the numbers he’s getting on Twitter, I highly suspect Tucker’s exclusivity on the platform is merely an interim situation. Social media is great for expanding the reach of content, but Tucker’s influence is likely to be diminished greatly if he stays exclusive to Twitter. Joining or starting his own television network is definitely his best longterm strategy.
