The return of “Jimmy Kimmel Live” to ABC on Tuesday was a significant second in historical past — because the present touted with a supercut of newscasters declaring its significance — and Kimmel has the numbers to show it.
His 28-minute monologue has reached 17.7 million views on YouTube in 22 hours, making it his most-watched monologue ever on the platform. (On ABC, the episode was Kimmel’s No. 3 of all time.) Beforehand, the highest monologue on YouTube was his 2020 remembrance of Kobe Bryant with slightly below the identical quantity, adopted by his 2017 announcement of his son’s birth and heart disease with 14.7 million views.
It’s presumable that lots of Kimmel’s YouTube viewers got here from areas that didn’t have entry to the printed on their native ABC stations. Nexstar and Sinclair, which personal roughly one-quarter of the nation’s ABC stations mixed, decided to continue preempting “Jimmy Kimmel Dwell” regardless of Disney reinstating the sequence.
It ought to be famous that Tuesday’s monologue isn’t the most-watched video on the “Jimmy Kimmel Dwell” web page total; there are at the moment round 100 interviews, comedy bits and different movies on the present’s web page with larger view counts, peaking with 80 million views on a game played by the “Avengers” cast.
Nonetheless, on condition that the video has solely been on-line for someday, and is prone to stay a subject of nationwide discourse for a while, the video will proceed accruing viewership, and has definitely outpaced latest monologues by a big issue. For instance, the Sept. 16 monologue that led to Kimmel’s suspension reached an often excessive 4.4 million views, whereas his monologues within the weeks earlier than Charlie Kirk’s assassination ranged between 1.8 million and three.9 million views — totals which have presumably risen considerably over the previous week amid the elevated consideration on Kimmel.
