Ever since ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson made the decision to reboot his show on Twitter's platform, people have been watching the viewership counts on his videos continue to climb, seemingly surpassing the kind of viewership he got when on cable.
"CNN is lucky to get 500,000 viewers on a show. Tucker’s video got 90 million, and counting -- compared to his 3.5 million average on the dead and irrelevant medium of cable," Carlson's biographer, Chadwick Moore, tweeted.
Carlson released the first episode of "Tucker on Twitter" June 6, gaining 114.8 million views by June 12. His second episode, released June 8, garnered around 55 million views by June 12.
But Twitter's viewership, Mediaite editor-in-chief Aidan McLaughlin reported, just doesn't compare to that of cable.
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Since Elon Musk decided to hide the video view metric at the end of May, the only metric available -- and the one being used to represent Carlson's viewership -- is Tweet views.
And all it takes to get a view is to scroll past the Tweet.
"Anyone who is logged into Twitter who views a Tweet counts as a view," Twitter's Help Center says.
Cable news ratings work a little differently.
"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. "In the digital space, 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."
A lot of people have seen Carlson's Tweets, but it's impossible to tell how many actually watched his show, the first episode of which has a little over 900,000 likes, compared to its 114.8 million views.
Fox News, alleging that Carlson breached his contract by launching his show on Twitter, sent their former star a cease-and-desist letter June 12.
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