While X does not publicly disclosed video views, Mashable reported that as of Thursday, 14.8 million people had watched at least 2 seconds of the Trump interview. A small fraction of that 14.8 million will have watched any significant amount of the 46-minute video.

Which means the Trump interview was seen by far fewer people than the Fox News debate.

The Fox debate drew 12.8 million viewers, according to Nielsen. But that metric measures the average concurrent viewers of a program. The total viewership of the debate is many millions more.

[Patrick Ruffini has even more on this point. The metric of tweet exposure is basically worthless, especially when it comes to someone with millions of followers, as any tweet will get that kind of mass exposure — even if no one engages it. Even when the video starts — automatically now in the Twitter/X app unless somehow disabled — the views do not account for any substantial *viewership*. — Ed]

But that’s not all…

Somehow when I did the same for “Rich Men North of Richmond” the entire view count of the original post & video got assigned to me.

These were the metrics for that.

Unique views were < 1/10th that reported on the post. Only a tiny fraction watched it all.… pic.twitter.com/ZcBPdOUd5x

— Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) August 25, 2023

Some insight on how public Twitter view counts inflate the actual viewership numbers on popular videos.

Around 1/1000 the reported number watched the “Rich Men” video all the way through. And that was 3 minutes long, not almost an hour. https://t.co/hiaywgXY8a

— Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) August 25, 2023