Posted in: ABC, TV, YouTube | Tagged: ABC, Jimmy Kimmel

Jimmy Kimmel Scores Big: 6.26M Viewers Despite Nexstar, Sinclair

Jimmy Kimmel scored big on Tuesday, locking in 6.26 million viewers despite Nexstar and Sinclair keeping it off of their 66 ABC stations.

When ABC announced that Jimmy Kimmel's late-night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live! would be returning on Tuesday night after being pulled from the airwaves last week, a whole lot of folks were expecting a whole lot of folks to tune in to see what Kimmel had to say. But even after being reinstated following a suspension for comments he made that drew controversial pushback from FCC chair Brendan Carr, Nexstar and Sinclair stuck with their decision not to air Kimmel's show on their collective 66 local affiliate stations, meaning Kimmel's words didn't air on about 23% of the country's television screens. Well, it looks like Carr, Nexstar, and Sinclair might need to go back to the drawing board regarding how they want to handle the late-night host moving forward.

Based on early Nielsen numbers that came in on Wednesday, Tuesday night's episode drew 6.26 million viewers. Breaking that down into demo groups, Kimmel's return show pulled a 0.87 rating among Adults 18-49 (approximately 1.18 million viewers), its best score for a regular weeknight episode since March 2015. Last night's numbers are more than three times higher than what the show averaged during the second quarter of this year. Between April and June, the late-night show averaged 1.77 million viewers over seven days of viewing (not including streaming) – that didn't include streaming but did include those now-MIA Nexstar and Sinclair stations. The numbers released by Nielsen are preliminary reporting, with a deeper data dive expected in the next few days.

For those who checked it out on YouTube, you were definitely not alone. The first 28 minutes of Tuesday night's show were posted on YouTube shortly after airing. At the time of this writing, the video has broken past the 15.5 million mark (YouTube considers 30 seconds or more of a video being played as a view), a record for the late-night host's monologue. When other social media views are factored in, the Disney-owned network notes that Kimmel's monologue has more than 26 million online views (and counting).

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