Saturday Night Live’s current season has felt a bit uneven, but there’s one area where it’s succeeding: lampooning Trump.
And that is apparently good for business. In addition to having its best season in 22 years, ratings-wise, SNL’s YouTube channel has also grown, thanks to Alec Baldwin’s Trump, Melissa McCarthy’s Sean Spicer, and Kellyanne McKinnon. According to Tubular Insights, between September 2016 and March 1, 2017, the channel leaped from 2.5 million subscribers to more than 3.8 million, for 48 percent growth in less than a year.
Last weekend’s Jeff Sessions-Forrest Grump sketch has more than 5 million views, but McCarthy’s surprise Spicer sketch from last month net more than 24 million views. The second most popular video is the Trump-Hillary debate cold open, with more than 23 million. The second McCarthy-Spicy sketch got 14 million.
Not everything was Trump-related; a few of the top 20 most popular clips hold some cultural resonance, like Dave Chappelle’s “Election Night,” and the “Black Jeopardy” sketch with Tom Hanks, which received more than 19 million views.
In this fractured climate, where Trump impersonators are fighting on Twitter, hopefully SNL can keep bringing us all together.
H/T Tubular Insights
