Tucker Carlson’s Twitter Launch Clocks Tens of Millions of Views – but Far, Far Lower Actual Engagement
07.06.2023 - 05:19
/ thewrap.com
on the tweet, as of this writing the first episode of “Tucker on Twitter” has been viewed at least 29 million times. Which is indeed a far larger number of people than the roughly 3 million, on average, who tuned in nightly when Carlson was still employed by Fox. But not so fast: Twitter’s measurements of actual engagement — retweets and quote tweets, likes, replies and bookmarks, tell much different, and far less impressive story.
As of this writing, the tweet hosting the first episode of “Tucker on Twitter” has been retweeted nearly 112,000 times, quote-tweeted around 13,000 times, liked around 373,000 times, and bookmarked around 22,000 times. It has also received around 35,000 replies. Here’s how it looked around 9 p.m.
Tuesday:Those aren’t low numbers exactly and they’re likely to go up overnight. Clearly Carlson has a lot of fans on Twitter. But there’s a huge gulf between engagement and ‘views’ numbers, and that discrepancy has a simple explanation: Twitter ‘views’ really tell us nothing whatsoever about how popular or sought-out a given tweet is.That’s not our assertion.
According to Twitter’s own FAQ regarding view counts, which you can read here, “Anyone who is logged into Twitter who views a Tweet counts as a view, regardless of where they see the Tweet (e.g. Home, Search, Profiles, etc.) or whether or not they follow the author. If you’re the author, looking at your own Tweet also counts as a view.”In other words, a view is counted even if you didn’t seek the Tweet out, but it crosses your screen while you’re scrolling.