Musk has made a big push to show off the “tweet view” metric of posts on his platform, adding it to the interface. Now you can see how many people have viewed each tweet on the site. Last month, he hid the “video view” metric, which showed how many people watched a video on Twitter. Even the video view metric was pretty flimsy: according to Twitter, if you watch a video for two seconds, with only half the video player in-view, you count as one video view.

The tweet view metric is even less valuable. It merely counts how many people viewed the tweet, so if you scrolled past Carlson’s video on Twitter, you counted as one of the 114 million. “Anyone who is logged into Twitter who views a Tweet counts as a view,” Twitter says. If you scrolled past the tweet multiple times, you counted more than once. …

Let’s compare that to cable news. When Musk’s boosters mock the 3.5 million that Carlson used to draw on his nightly Fox News show, they are referring to a metric from Nielsen that measures the average concurrent viewers of a program. If an average of 3.5 million people watched an episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News, the peak of concurrents is even higher, and the total viewership would be millions more.

[Well, okay, BUT. It’s true that these are measuring different things, and than the cable-net ratings drill down more deeply and reliably. However, the fact that there were 114 million views of the tweet itself shows an astronomical amount of interest by Twitter users, especially in the short time period in which that took place. Just to use myself as a comparison (with ~64,200 followers), I got 2.37 million tweet impressions *over 28 days* — and that was a 74% improvement over the previous 28 days. Tucker’s score on that video is a monster number, and advertisers will take notice. — Ed]