Taylor Swift has another victory on her hands. It turns out the singer's music videos are more popular than most TV shows, according to a new Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings study that was commissioned by Vevo. The study found that Swift’s music videos had a bigger audience than all but one network TV show during the week that she debuted her star-studded “Bad Blood” video, racking up 18 million viewers. Only NCIS: Los Angeles earned bigger viewing numbers that week. It should be noted that "Bad Blood" also broke a monumental Vevo record by scoring 20.1 million views in the first day and breaking their previous record for views in a 24-hour period.
Drake and Rihanna both also made major waves with their sizable music video audiences. Drake’s videos were watched by nearly six million U.S. viewers during the week that the “Hotline Bling” video dropped. Similarly, Rihanna's videos were watched by almost 6 million viewers when “Bitch Better Have My Money” arrived over the summer. The study determined that a RiRi video is twice as likely to reach 18-49 year-olds than CBS’s hit show Big Brother. “We wanted to do an apples to apples comparison. That’s why the company wanted to go beyond just tracking video views, and commissioned Nielsen to measure audience share of individual artists against its panels," Andrea Zapata, Vevo VP of research, told Variety. Zapata noted that the results are evidence that many of us are spending more and more of our time online.
