Box of Lies, Password, and True Confessions are just a handful of the games played on Jimmy Fallon’s "Tonight Show." Every week he draws viewers in through interviewing musicians, actors, and comedians, even though he is often criticized for laughing through most interviews or throwing in his own impressions.
The other week he even had Cardi B as his co-host after she made an appearance as the musical guest on "Saturday Night Live." Though Fallon has the ability to appeal to a younger demographic, his ratings have been dropping.
Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” has been ahead of Fallon in ratings for some time now. However, the margin between them has grown even larger as Colbert edges out Fallon by over 1.2 million viewers. Colbert’s rise started around the time of Trump’s inauguration last January.
This evidently parallels to the fact that Colbert is geared towards a, what you would call, "serious" audience. I can imagine my grandparents sitting down to watch a Colbert interview. If Fallon came on the television though, they wouldn’t care to hear musical impressions or watch a water fight.
Fallon oftentimes appeals to a smaller range of audiences. The Colbert Late Show Instagram yields 605 thousand followers, while Fallon Tonight yields 4.3 million. For further reference, Jimmy Kimmel Live has 1.2 million followers, and The Late Late Show with James Corden Instagram yields 1.6 million. Keep in mind that these are the show’s personal Instagrams, not the hosts’ themselves. How is it that the show with the smallest social media following, brings in the most viewers?
Data of viewer ratings comes from Nielsen data. Younger generations are less likely to watch the show live, but are more likely to watch interesting segment clips on YouTube, or catch up with them on streaming services like Hulu which is not include in this data. These demographics of viewers are also the ones who follow Fallon on Instagram.
It is older generations that are determining the rating on television. They are likely to watch the show as it airs, whereas someone, like me, may follow Fallon on Instagram but barely watch his show on television. More followers do not correlate to having a larger audience and higher ratings because of the technology present in the show’s demographics today.
