March Mayhem Creates Impressive Month For TV News Views
An eventful March fueled yet another increase for TV news publishers across YouTube and Facebook, as recent data from Tubular Labs shows. As market fears grew and the Trump administration made waves with tariffs and sweeping policy changes, domestic audiences followed along on social video to stay informed.
A quick overview of how major U.S. TV news publishers grew viewers in March:
Fox News grew its U.S. unique viewers across Facebook and YouTube by 32% month-over-month, to 60.1 million, while minutes watched soared 26% to 1.6 billion (both 13-month highs).
ABC News saw modest gains, growing unique U.S. viewers by 5% and watch-time by 1% month-over-month.
CBS News increased its audience by 51%, with minutes watched up 29% vs. February.
MSNBC grew unique viewers by 20% and watch-time by 28%.
CNN’s unique viewers climbed by 21%, while watch-time jumped a staggering 80% month-over-month.
Over the course of the month, top videos across CNN, ABC News, CBS News and MSNBC largely revolved around tariffs, economic fears, or other policy-related topics – CNN, in particular, saw many of its top videos come from Canadian reactions to proposed American tariffs. It also looked in part toward longer videos to keep audiences engaged for more time. Of CNN’s 861 uploads across Facebook and YouTube in March, just 18% were shorts, while over 30% were videos running longer than five minutes (and 17 of the 20 most-watched videos ran for over five minutes as well).
(March Audience Ratings data from Tubular Labs)
Things differed for Fox News, however.
Top videos on Fox News (by views) were largely devoid of tariff and economic conversations, and more focused on Elon Musk’s DOGE, human interest pieces and Ukraine. The most-seen Fox News video was a Facebook upload of a student almost getting hit by a car, and received 13.9 million views. Musk was featured in four of the top 15 videos, including a 38-minute “behind the scenes” segment on how DOGE works.
Similar to other news publishers, Fox did find success with longer videos, too. In March, 14 of the network’s 20 most-watched videos ran for over five minutes — though four of the top 20 were also short-format videos (including the aforementioned most-watched upload).
While it’s not the old “Trump Bump” for news, the monthly increases across the board do seem to hint at an environment that creates more tune-in for news publishers. As economic uncertainty grows in April, it’ll be interesting to see if those audience trends continue as well.
