With appearances from Taylor Swift and NSYNC and performances by Shakira, Demi Lovato and Doja Cat, this year’s MTV Video Music Awards ceremony stayed even with the 2022 ceremony.
Like the year before, Tuesday’s VMAs were watched by 3.9 million people across MTV, Comedy Central, Paramount Network, TVLand, Country Music Television, MTV2, Logo, Pop TV, Nickelodeon/Nick at Nite, VH1, BET, BET Her, Univision and UniMás. Viewership on MTV alone was up 37% with 865,000 viewers compared to last year’s 630,000. These statistics are based on fast national data from Nielsen, and do not include Paramount+, where the ceremony did not become available until Wednesday.
Total minutes consumed were up 14.5% with 1.8 billion compared to last year’s 1.6 billion, indicating that viewers tuned in to the show for a longer amount of time on average than they did previously.
Paramount Global says this was also the “most social” VMAs of all time, citing 46 million interactions online measured by Social Content Ratings.
MTV also boasts that the VMAs’ adults 18-49 and 18-34 ratings made way for the network’s best primetime averages for a Tuesday night since 2014. However, it should be noted that this achievement was more or less a given, as the VMAs tend to be MTV’s biggest telecast of the year and have not aired on a Tuesday between 2014 and now. Those high-scoring 2014 telecasts (which still outrank the 2023 VMAs), MTV says, represent “various programming including premieres and repeats.”
