Tuesday’s return to ABC was a major moment in history as the show was promoted in a newscaster’s supercut that declared its importance.
His 28-minute monologue reached 17.7 million views on YouTube in 22 hours, making it the most viewed monologue on the platform. (On ABC, the episode was Kimmel’s third place in history.) Previously, YouTube’s top monologue was Kobe Bryant’s memory of 2020, a small amount of the same amount, followed by 14.7 million announcements of his son’s birth and heart disease.
It can be estimated that many of Kimmel’s YouTube viewers came from areas where broadcasts are not accessible at their local ABC station. Despite Disney’s revival of the series, Nexstar and Sinclair, who own around a quarter of the country’s ABC stations, have decided to continue ahead of “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”
Please note that Tuesday’s monologue is not the most viewed video on the entire “Jimmy Kimmel Live” page. Currently, the show’s pages have around 100 interviews, comedy bits and other videos, peaking at 80 million views in the game played by the “Avengers” cast.
Still, given that the video is only online for a day and likely to remain a topic of national discourse for some time, the video continues to generate audiences, certainly outweighing recent monologues by a major factor. For example, the September 16th monologue that led to Kimmel’s suspension usually reached 4.4 million views, but his monologue, a few weeks before Charlie Kirk’s assassination, ranged between 1.8 million and 3.9 million viewings.
