Former President Donald Trump touted the dubious viewership numbers for his interview with former Fox News star Tucker Carlson but video metrics appear to show that far more people watched the Fox News Republican debate.
Carlson posted the 46-minute interview, pre-taped at the former president's golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, on X, formerly Twitter, just minutes before the first GOP debate began airing on the conservative network Wednesday night. The interview garnered upwards of 75 million views on the platform the night it went live, according to X's view counter, and hundreds more since.
"The Tucker Carlson Interview with me was a BLOCKBUSTER. Could hit 200,000,000 Views, and more!" Trump posted on Truth Social Thursday morning. When Carlson's post later reached around 231 million views, Trump declared it "The Biggest Video on Social Media, EVER, more than double the Super Bowl," which drew more than 115 million viewers when it aired in February.
In a Thursday night appearance on Newsmax, the former president continued to boast about the interview's ratings, telling host Greg Kelly that it reached "record-setting numbers" and was up to 257 million views with a potential to garner up to 300 million before it loses traction.
"The biggest ever interview was Oprah with Michael Jackson," Trump said, adding, "I think we've doubled it up."
As of late Friday morning, Carlson's tweet with the conversation displayed a count of 254.6 million views.
The former president went on to surmise that the reason for the high viewership was because "our country is dying for a good country again," asserting that, under his administration, the U.S. had "the safest boarders, the biggest tax cuts" and was all around doing better compared to the current "failing nation" that it is.
Trump on his interview with Tucker: The biggest ever interview was Oprah with Michael Jackson… I think we've doubled it up pic.twitter.com/Ay2smWhTBa
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 25, 2023
But the metric on X is not a sum of the views Carlson's video received, but a sum of the number of views the tweet itself got.
According to Mashable, Carlson's interview with Trump had only received 14.8 million video views on X as of Thursday evening. While the tweet's impressions — which counts when a user actively clicks on a tweet, the tweet appears in a user's timeline after being retweeted and when it appears in a user's timeline via the algorithm — grew toward 300 million, the actual video view count was 220 million views less than that.
Video views only count the amount of times a piece of media is played for two or more seconds on the platform, which includes when a user has 50 percent of the content visible on the screen for that length of time and when the media autoplays.
"To break down what this means for Tucker Carlson's Trump interview: The video itself was actually played only 14.8 million times, for at least two seconds of the more than 46-minute interview — or just over six percent of the total 236 million times someone saw the post on X," Mashable's Matt Binder explained.
Under Elon Musk's leadership, Twitter began removing the video view count from public view in May months after he added a "views" count metric to tweets in general. While both metrics displayed on users' tweets for a time, the company ultimately scrapped the typically smaller, though more accurate, video view count and kept the higher, though inaccurate, tweet views.
Some older Android versions of the Twitter app continued to show the public video view metrics on X, and Mashable was able to access and pull the data from it.
The outlet also found that Carlson's new show on X routinely displayed an impressions total that was five or six times greater than the actual video views per episode. Carlson's interview with contentious right-wing influencer Andrew Tate in July, as of Thursday evening, had 17.9 million video views on X but some 107 million impressions. By comparison, despite having fewer than half the impressions of his interview with Trump, which had an impressions-to-video-views ratio of almost 17:1, Carlson's Tate interview raked in over 3 million more video views.
Despite being lauded as counter-programming to the Fox debate, Trump's interview with Carlson "was seen by far fewer people than the Fox News debate," wrote Mediaite's Aidan McLaughlin, though the metrics are measured differently.
Nielsen reported that the Republican presidential debate drew 12.8 million viewers. But that count measures the average concurrent viewers of a program, meaning that the event's total viewership is far higher.
"In TV, the standard measurement unit for viewership is the average-minute audience — how many viewers there are in an average minute of content," Steve Hasker, Nielsen's former president and the current CEO of Thomson Reuters, explained in 2015. "In the digital space, on the other hand, video measurement is commonly expressed as the gross number of times the video is viewed, even if only for one minute or one second. These two metrics are quite different, and comparing one to the other unfairly tilts the comparison against TV."
