Interest in the follow-up to last year’s infamous Kanye West-Taylor Swift encounter and a “Jersey Shore”-fueled resurgence in MTV led the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards to the show’s highest viewership in eight years.
The show’s audience of 11.4 million was the network’s largest since the 2002 VMAs and an improvement from last year’s solid 9 million. After dropping to just 5.8 million viewers in 2006, MTV’s flagship awards show has been gaining steady ground.
Among the network’s target persons 12-34 demo, the show garnered a massive audience of 7.9 million.
Ratings for Sunday’s new “Jersey Shore,” which led into the MTV pre-show, were not available. A quarterly breakdown, which is not always made available for cable broadcasts, would also prove interesting, as the assumption is that the Taylor Swift and Kanye West performances (and possibly the outdoor Justin Bieber gig) produced ratings spikes that contributed heavily to the impressive viewership average.
