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Comment by eql5 | Hacker News Reader

Tucker has never been more successful: hundreds of millions of views on some of his latest twitter/X interviews.

Tweet views don't mean watching video, and are not comparable to TV viewers metric.

We'll see how this X-career pans out. Remember when Facebook used to report massive video viewership, and it turned out to be miscounted nonsense that ruined businesses that pivoted to videos on FB?

That's like telling me that "We've been trying to reach you about your car's extended warranty" calls have never been more successful.

Yes, he's getting impressions. But are people actually watching significant portions of the video? You have no idea at all.

And how's his revenue? That's only one way to measure success, but it's a pretty important one. And you have no idea at all.

For some reason he has an enormous following outside of the US.

Some of my friends in Eastern Europe are huge fans, but I can't really figure out why, to me he's just another conservative interviewer/host.

an even wider reach than before

he got something like 480m views on his latest interview with an argentinian presidential candidate

it 2x'd his interview with trump overnight

You guys are crazy if you believe those view counts. Musk just said X/Twitter has 550M monthly users (and a giant bot problem which I'm sure makes up a sizable number there). So 480M views could mean tens of millions of users viewed "an interview with an Argentinian presidential candidate" dozens of times or, in the most extreme, that 87% of Twitter's monthly "users" viewed it exactly once. It just doesn't make sense. In reality, those numbers are juiced to make content look more viral than reality because it's nearly impossible for Twitter to know if a "person" actually "viewed" the content. Many former Twitter engineers said as much when Musk rolled out the new view count.

These "views" are just non-unique impressions ("tweet was for a couple of seconds in some user's viewport", including quote tweets), it surely doesn't mean someone watched the video.

480m does not sound legit. Something doesn't add up when it's a candidate from a country with a population of 46m and twitter has a possible user base of 550m.

For some context Mr Beast videos have ~100m views and his content is geared towards children with a ton of time on their hands.

afaik mrbeast says he also gets more views on spanish videos

the spanish internet base is larger

IIRC views are just impressions, i.e. someone scrolling their for you page sees a clip and keeps scrolling. It doesn't even count unique impressions. Some poor smuck doomscrolling might scroll past it 5-10x that night and each one would be a view.

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