TV Ratings: VMAs Hit 11-Year High With Madonna, Taylor Swift Front and Center - The Hollywood Reporter
The 2025 MTV Video Music Awards achieved their highest viewership in over a decade, bolstered by a strong NFL lead-in. The event featured major performances and awards for artists including Madonna, Taylor Swift, and Nirvana.
Why it matters
Demonstrates the continued power of live event television when paired with high-traffic sports programming.
Logo text The MTV Video Music Awards scored their largest audience in more than a decade on Sunday night.
The awards averaged 8.99 million viewers on CBS and MTV in Nielsen’s final big data plus panel ratings for Sunday (including an encore on the latter); preliminary ratings had the show at 8.43 million. That’s up by 60 percent from last year’s 5.6 million viewers - which was also a multi-year high. Sunday’s audience was the biggest for the VMAs since the 2015 show brought in more than 12 million people across multiple channels.
The VMAs also had their best performance among adults 18-49 (2.67 million in that age range) since 2018; and among adults 25-54 (3.14 million) and adults 18-34 (1.15 million) since 2019.
Also covering this story
6 other newsrooms covered this event. We read each version separately.
Taylor Swift dominates but do music videos matter?
Taylor Swift dominated the VMAs, but do music videos still matter?
11 of the best and worst looks from the 2026 VMAs
MTV VMAs 2026: full list of winners
MTV VMAs 2026 TV Ratings Are the Best in 11 Years
Biggest VMAs moments, from Madonna's performance to Taylor Swift's new record - USA Today
Get smarter about the news
Sign up free for a feed built around what you actually care about, Dive Deeper research on any story, and the full text of every article.
Create free accountAlready have an account? Sign in