MTV’s Video Music Awards held August 27, 2017 live from Inglewood, California’s The Forum continued its annual year-to-year decline in television ratings, drawing 1.36 adults 18-49 rating (down from 1.78 last year) and averaging 2.66 million overall viewers (down from 3.27 million) according to live+same-day data posted by Showbuzz. The decline is particularly troubling for MTV given last year’s ratings were already a steep decline from 2015, in turn down from 2014. What’s more, concurrently aired simulcasts across multiple Viacom stations were also down: VH1 ratings were down 0.71 million viewers from 0.89 million last year, Comedy Central down 0.42 million viewers from 0.48 million last year, Spike down 0.43 million from 0.44 million, BET down 0.47 million from 0.49 million. Only TV Land and MTV 2 rose in viewership (respectively 0.39 million from 0.31 million last year, and 0.29 million from 0.20 million last year).

For several years MTV has been shifting its focus towards twitter and online viewing, and in that regard the 2017 VMAs were a success. The VMAs trended globally for 13 hours on twitter. From Sunday 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. ET the show was the number-one trending topic in the U.S. and held eight of Twitter’s top twelve U.S. trending topics at its peak Sunday night. It remains to be seen if MTV’s real time sharing of monetized videos from the award show on social media will net significant profits or be emulated by other award shows with similarly declining TV ratings. Links to watch all of the 2017’s VMA performances are at the bottom of this post.