Elon Musk has a vision for Twitter: Video content.
Musk has encouraged podcast hosts to upload their video episodes to the platform. He has hinted at bringing back Twitter’s standalone livestreaming video app, Periscope. And just this past weekend, he mentioned Mr. Beast in a tweet, urging the YouTube star to post his video content to Twitter.
However, one of Musk’s first big gets for Twitter’s video push – former Fox News host Tucker Carlson – may be offering up a warning to those who were considering Twitter’s video pivot.
Tucker Carlson’s tweet impressions and video views have faced a steep decline since the popular conservative figure launched his Twitter-based show, “Tucker Carlson on Twitter.”
As Media Matters for America Senior Fellow Matthew Gertz points out(opens in a new tab), tweet impressions for Tucker Carlson’s tweets, sharing his video series have drastically decreased since Carlson posted his show announcement video in early May, which attracted 137.1 million tweet views. The most recent Carlson tweet sharing the show, episode 8 of the series on June 30, has only received 8.6 million tweet views. Mashable was able to access the video view counts for each of Carlson’s tweets, a metric that is no longer publicly available but continues to display on some older versions of the Twitter app. Those video view counts are even smaller.
The show’s tweet views have continued to drop, show after show, aside from two episodes that received special assistance, such as a share from Elon Musk promoting the video.
Episode 1, for example, kicked things off with 120 million tweet views and then dramatically fell to 60.6 million tweet views for episode 2. The special Trump indictment episode, episode 3, received 104.1 million tweet views and then lost more than half of its reach with episode 4, which only received 32.4 million tweet views.
It’s important to note the difference between tweet views and video views. Tweet views are essentially impressions on a tweet, i.e. how many times a tweet was served to Twitter’s users. Twitter once provided the raw video view counts, much like how YouTube and other video platforms provide. However, since Musk’s takeover, the company has removed video view counts from most Twitter clients in exchange for tweet views, which offer a much higher – and skewed – number.
However, Mashable has access(opens in a new tab) to the tweet view count as some older versions of Twitter’s mobile Android app still display these analytics.
These numbers show that the tweet views metrics are often as much as 100 million views more than video views. On Twitter, a video view is counted if a user plays at least 2 seconds of a video and the video player is visibly on at least 50 percent of the user’s screen. For example, if Tucker Carlson video shows up on a user’s feed and the user has autoplay enabled and they don’t scroll past it before 2 seconds of the video play, then that counts as a view for the video.
According to the video view metric, Tucker Carlson’s announcement video has 28.9 million video views. However, since then, it appears Carlson’s videos have dropped by roughly 85 percent.
Tucker Carlson on Twitter lost roughly half of its viewership from episode 1, which had 26.7 million video views to episode 2, which has only 13.9 million views. The special Trump indictment episode brought Carlson’s numbers back up and amassed 22.1 million views before dropping back down to 10.2 million views for episode 4.
The most recent episode, episode 8, has 3.8 million video views.
Carlson averaged(opens in a new tab) around 3.25 million viewers per episode on his primetime cable news program on Fox News. And, it should be noted, that TV viewership metrics are calculated(opens in a new tab) by how many viewers there are in an average minute of content, not just how many users might have accidentally played 2 seconds of a clip while scrolling by.
In April, Fox News fired Tucker Carlson. The former host of Tucker Carlson Tonight soon moved to Twitter to release a series of video episodes, promoted by the platform’s owner Elon Musk. Musk has insisted that there was no payment deal made or contract offered to Carlson to post his show on the platform. However, Musk has regularly used Carlson’s videos to promote Twitter as a future player in the online video space.
Fox News sent(opens in a new tab) Carlson a cease-and-desist letter after he launched his Twitter show, claiming the program breached his contract with the company. Carlson’s legal representation responded(opens in a new tab), saying that he “would not be silenced,” and has continued to upload the video episodes of his show to Twitter.
