Comey’s Ratings

So who watched that Jim Comey interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos last evening?

Closed to 10 million people, apparently.

I won’t even come close to wading into the politics, but from a media perspective, the Hollywood Reporter made some interesting observations about the ratings and the matchups.

From my perspective, it was a bold move for ABC to put this interview in a time slot that was competing against the Academy of Country Music Awards show. Then again, there might be some Red State, Blue State (Deep State?) method to that madness.

The hour-long interview (well, hour-long, save for what seemed like 25 minutes of commercials) averaged 9.8 million viewers with a 2.4 rating in the news demo for adults 25-54 for the network.

But the ACMA still won the night, averaging 12.1 million viewers.

And let’s not forget Stephanopoulos and Comey were also competing with AMC’s “The Walking Dead” and Showtimes “Billions.” It was a rough night all around!

Anderson Cooper’s “60 Minutes” interview with Stormy Daniels on March 25th way outpaced the Comey Q&A 2:1, pulling in 22 million viewers (according to Nielsen).

To put all those numbers in some perspective, this year’s Super Bowl, which reached a seven-year low in terms of ratings, had viewership of 111.3 million and a 37.1 rating.

As for Comey’s book, it goes on sale tomorrow and currently sits atop the Amazon Kindle list of the Top 100 Paid books list.