‘Absolutely Huge!’ Jimmy Kimmel’s Return Breaks Record, Reports CNN’s Harry Enten

CNN data guru Harry Enten joined anchor Sara Sidner on Wednesday morning to break down the numbers for Jimmy Kimmel’s return to air on ABC the night prior, following a brief suspension from his late-night show.

“Huge, absolutely huge!” Enten began, mocking President Donald Trump.

“What are we talking about here? Well, let’s take a look at YouTube views. Jimmy Kimmel Live video views: the six-month median video only gets 240,000. Look how many views Tuesday night’s monologue already has: 6.7 million. That’s over 25 times as large as the median Jimmy Kimmel video normally gets, and I was looking—it is by far the largest video in at least six months. So if Donald Trump’s idea was to give Jimmy Kimmel more press and more viewership, he absolutely did so. Of course, I don’t think that is what Donald Trump intended to do,” he added.

Sidner followed up, “Do you have any sense beyond YouTube of just how big his appeal may have been? Like, a lot of people wanted to clearly watch this from all facets—not just in America, but you know, this is from around the world.”

“That’s exactly right. So we got this 6.7 million—I will note that that number is up already about 700,000 from the last time I checked, which was about an hour ago. But take a look here: record high Google searches last night for ‘what time is Jimmy Kimmel on?’ You wouldn’t have to check what time Jimmy Kimmel was on if you were a regular viewer,” Enten replied, adding:

The reason that people were checking what time Jimmy Kimmel was on is because he was potentially pulling in a lot of viewers who normally didn’t watch. And get this: up over 10,000%! My goodness gracious. This, of course, dates all the way back since 2004, basically since Jimmy Kimmel was first on the air.

So no, it was not just on YouTube. There was a ton of interest—what we’re talking about nationwide, worldwide—in terms of “what time was Jimmy Kimmel on?” Because “I don’t normally watch him, but maybe I want to take a gander because maybe I’m interested to hear what he has to say.”

Sidner pressed, “Jimmy Kimmel himself sort of said, ‘Look, when Disney did this, I went to them. I didn’t like it.’ But he also said thank you to Disney for keeping his show on. Is there any indication that Disney has something to be happy for? He even plugged ‘go to Disney Plus, here’s how to,’ you know, as a joke, but ‘here’s how to re-up your subscription.’”

“Yeah, I think there were a lot of people, especially on the left, who were upset at Disney for suspending Jimmy Kimmel,” Enten noted, adding:

And we saw Google searches last week for “boycotting Disney” and “canceling Disney Plus” go way up. But take a look here: Google searches versus last week’s peak. “Boycotting Disney”—down about 75% as of last night. How about “cancel Disney Plus”? Down about 75% from its peak. So the bottom line is this was great for Jimmy Kimmel in terms of what we see so far on YouTube.

It’s probably going to translate to the ratings. And also, Jimmy Kimmel’s return is good for Disney because all of a sudden people aren’t so interested in boycotting them or canceling their Disney Plus subscription. So it ends up being pretty decent for Disney’s bottom line, bringing Jimmy Kimmel back to the stage.

“We’ll see how it goes throughout the many weeks that he is on. Harry Enten, it is always a pleasure to be here with you,” Sidner concluded.

Enten later shared the clip online and noted, “Trump didn’t break Kimmel; he energized him. Viewership of Kimmel’s monologue has already broken records.”

Watch the clip above via CNN.