In the late-night war, ratings are no longer the only battlefield.
For the social media-savvy Jimmys — Kimmel and Fallon, that is — the fight for YouTube viewers may prove even fiercer than for TV watchers. And it’s a fight that, last week, Fallon won by a landslide.
From March 3 to 10, “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” garnered 27.5 million video views on YouTube, while “Jimmy Kimmel Live” earned 7.6 million views, according to data from social analytics firm RelishMIX provided to deadline.com.
That is despite the fact that Kimmel has more YouTube subscribers — nearly 4 million to Fallon’s 2.7 million. But in that measure, the NBC host is gaining ground as well. Last week, “The Tonight Show” added 192,000 subscribers while “JKL” added just 53,000, according to RelishMIX.
Both shows have put an emphasis on viral videos in an effort to capture younger viewers (those under 50) most important to advertisers — Fallon with bits like “Slow Jamming the News” and “History of Rap,” and Kimmel with his star-studded parodies like “Movie: The Movie.”
For the week of March 3, Fallon’s top video bits were him, Idina Menzel and the Roots singing “Let It Go” (from the hit Disney film “Frozen”) with classroom instruments (7.6 million views), and a water war with Lindsay Lohan (1.8 million views). Kimmel’s most-viewed video got 4.9 million hits, for Joseph Gordon-Levitt recreating the viral YouTube video “David After Dentist,” while his interview with embattled Toronto Mayor Rob Ford earned 1.9 million views.
The recent wide margin doesn’t mean Kimmel is going to start making his videos sillier a la Fallon, however. The prankster host — whose recent fake videos of a wolf wandering the hotel hall at the Sochi Olympics and a twerking girl who set herself on fire went viral — told tech site Re/code in an interview this week that he will continue to do more prank videos.