It's been nearly two months since Tucker Carlson, upon being ousted from Fox News, pivoted to Twitter where he has since uploaded seven episodes of his new show, "Tucker on Twitter."
In the beginning, it looked like Carlson was flying high without Fox News. His initial announcement received nearly 137 million views since being posted, a number that seems far beyond his March average viewership on Fox, which amounted to a little more than 3 million people.
DON'T MISS: Tucker Carlson's Twitter Ratings Seem Like Good News -- But There's One Major Catch
Carlson's first episode, a 10-minute-long monologue, achieved around 119 million views; his second, 60 million; his fourth, 32 million. Carlson's latest episode, released June 27, has less than 13 million views.
There are two things going on here. The first is that, despite retweets from Twitter owner Elon Musk, Carlson's episodes are hitting fewer eyeballs. The second involves what viewership means on each platform.
On Twitter, all it takes to get a view is for a user to scroll past the tweet. A tweet can rack up views without being engaged with and without its video being watched. Carlson's latest episode has fewer than 260,000 likes compared to its millions of views. His announcement video -- the one with almost 137 million views -- has less than a million likes.
Cable viewership, on the other hand, is measured through the average concurrent audience: "In TV, the standard measurement unit for viewership is the average-minute audience -- how many viewers there are in an average minute of content," Nielsen's former president, Steve Hasker, said in 2015.
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Even Carlson's highest viewership numbers likely don't match up to the ratings he brought in at Fox.
And while Carlson fights it out on Twitter, Fox News -- though it did take a hit when he left -- remained the most-watched cable news network for the second quarter of 2023, according to Nielsen. Fox's average daily viewership of 1.1 million far beat out runner-up MSNBC, which had 796,000.
Fox News -- which issued Carlson a cease-and-desist letter June 12 -- announced June 26 that Jesse Watters will be moving into Carlson's previous prime time spot.
