“Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver topped his own personal best with the Feb. 28 episode devoted to Donald Drumpf…er, Trump.
The digital distribution of the 20-minute segment from the HBO episode, which included a call to action for viewers to #MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain, grabbed 59 million Facebook video views, and other 19 million on YouTube. That was enough to top Oliver’s previous best, beating the Facebook privacy clip and FIFA YouTube clip.
It also broke the series’ record for daily engagement since its premiere in April of 2014, twice, with 10.4 milllion engagements on March 1, and nearly 7.5 million on March 2 — tracking nearly 3 million engagements ahead of its previous record from September of 2014. It even led to the creation of a new Wikipedia page, which has already garnered thousands of page views.
Provided by ListenFirst Media, DAR – TV measures what entertainment content is resonating most across Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube and Wikipedia combined. For more on the methodology behind DAR – TV, scroll to the bottom of the article.
 Digital Audience Ratings (DAR) – TV |
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| Broadcast | Monday Feb 29, 2016 – Sunday Mar 6, 2016 | |||||
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| RANK | LAST WEEK | PROGRAM | RATING(000) | |||
| 1 | |
2 | The Voice | 32,939 | ||
| 2 | |
1 | American Idol | 12,290 | ||
| 3 | |
5 | Kitchen Nightmares | 4,222 | ||
| 4 | |
4 | America’s Got Talent | 3,627 | ||
| 5 | |
8 | Empire | 2,457 | ||
| 6 | |
3 | America’s Funniest Home Videos | 2,339 | ||
| 7 | |
6 | The Simpsons | 1,921 | ||
| 8 | |
– | Quantico | 1,870 | ||
| 9 | |
– | The Big Bang Theory | 1,162 | ||
| 10 | |
10 | Grey’s Anatomy | 1,135 | ||
| – |
| Cable/Streaming | Monday Feb 29, 2016 – Sunday Mar 6, 2016 | |||||
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| RANK | LAST WEEK | PROGRAM | RATING(000) | |||
| 1 | |
2 | Top Gear | 8,003 | ||
| 2 | |
3 | Dance Moms | 6,823 | ||
| 3 | |
1 | Lip Sync Battle | 6,629 | ||
| 4 | |
4 | Key & Peele | 4,927 | ||
| 5 | |
6 | Pretty Little Liars | 4,237 | ||
| 6 | |
5 | The Walking Dead | 4,222 | ||
| 7 | |
9 | Teen Wolf | 3,670 | ||
| 8 | |
– | Impractical Jokers | 2,563 | ||
| 9 | |
– | Jay Leno’s Garage | 2,359 | ||
| 10 | |
– | Beyond Scared Straight | 2,328 | ||
| – |
| Late Night | Monday Feb 29, 2016 – Sunday Mar 6, 2016 | |||||
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| RANK | LAST WEEK | PROGRAM | RATING(000) | |||
| 1 | |
1 | The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon | 56,900 | ||
| 2 | |
3 | Jimmy Kimmel Live! | 48,274 | ||
| 3 | |
– | Last Week Tonight with John Oliver | 30,439 | ||
| 4 | |
2 | The Late Late Show With James Corden | 28,891 | ||
| 5 | |
4 | Conan | 21,011 | ||
| – |
| Trending | Monday Feb 29, 2016 – Sunday Mar 6, 2016 | |
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| PROGRAM | RATING(000) | % CHANGE |
| Long Lost Family | 365 | +43,455% |
| Teachers | 1,021 | +17,644% |
| Huckabee | 82 | +1,787% |
Jason Klein is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of ListenFirst Media, a data and analytics company providing insights for brands. ListenFirst aggregates data streams from a wide range of digital, social, and traditional marketing sources to help brands optimize business performance.
Methodology:
ListenFirst Digital Audience Ratings (DAR) for Television are a raw aggregate of daily engagements based on owned, earned and organic consumer behavior on Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Tumblr, Wikipedia and YouTube. These engagements encompass metrics pertaining to audience growth, page/profile views, page-level and post-level interactions, hashtag volume and Wikipedia page views for all television program pages (which provides a proxy for organic search volume).
Organic conversation volume is calculated based on the use of official hashtags, as well as those hashtags submitted directly from programmers and distributors. Only hashtags where conversation can be isolated to a specific television program are included in the rating.
The Variety weekly leaderboards for television represent the 7-day (Monday – Sunday) sum total of DAR – TV for all episodic programming, in and out of season, from the most popular programmers (Broadcast, Cable, & Streaming Services). Sports, live events, short-form content and other non-episodic programming are excluded from this ranking cohort but available to be rated directly by ListenFirst Media.
The Broadcast and Cable/Streaming Originals leaderboards each surface the respective top ten primetime programs. The Late Night leaderboard surfaces the top five late night / variety genre programs, from across the programming universe. Streaming Originals are considered primetime cable programming.
The Trending Leaderboard surfaces the three programs that tracked the largest relative growth in DAR – TV (from the previous 7-day measurement period), and are also in the top 25% based on absolute DAR – TV, from across the programming universe.
ListenFirst monitors the official digital account owned by the program on each aforementioned platform (except for Wikipedia, where the title-specific profile is considered official). Only the U.S. version of a program’s digital presence is monitored; for platforms that support regional profiles like Facebook, the “Global” profile is considered the U.S. profile. Only profiles that can be attributed to the specific program contribute to the rating (i.e. engagements that happen on the profile facebook.com/LouieFX are tracked, while engagements that happen on facebook.com/FX are not). For YouTube, in addition to any program-specific presence, content related to the program in question that originated on the parent company’s official YouTube channel is considered.
Note: Twitter data has been removed from Digital Audience Ratings (DAR) for Television as of 10/7/2014.
For other questions pertaining to methodology, contact ListenFirst Media.