Unsurprisingly (or surprisingly, depending on how you look at it), last night's MTV VMAs didn't actually break any major ratings records despite all that Miley-Cyrus-marching-through-subway-tunnels promotion MTV rolled out in the weeks before the show. According to Deadline, about 10.1 million viewers total tuned in to the VMAs to see Miley Cyrus twerking on Robin Thicke while he sang that song you hate to love, "Blurred Lines," which, believe it or not, is hardly an astounding number. It's not bad by any means — just nothing special.
On the bright side, it is much better than the ratings that last year's VMAs saw: the 2012 award show only pulled in 6.1 million viewers. When you compare those two numbers, yeah, the show did great — but when you look at the 2011 show's ratings of 12.4 million viewers, it suddenly doesn't seem that special. In 2010, the VMAs pulled in about 11.59 million, so it's not more than that, either.
As for the specific breakdown, Deadline reports that 4.6 million of them were in the advertiser-covered 12-34 age range, meaning that the telecast is now the number one rated cable entertainment telecast of the year in MTV's target demo. So, MTV is likely all good with these results.
Fun fact: Miley's performance also broke the record for most live-tweets, pulling in about 306,000 tweets a minute. The previous record holder was Beyoncé's halftime show, when Destiny's Child reunited on stage. I'm pretty sure, though — if 'NSYNC had done more than, like, 20 seconds of a performance, they'd have blown that icky Miley/Robin Thicke performance right out of the East River. GET ON IT, GUYS.
