Comedy Central’s first-ever Comedy Awards on Sunday produced a spike in viewers for the Viacom-owned channels it ran on.
The two-hour telecast was watched by 16.8 million viewers on Comedy Central, Spike, TV Land, VH1, CMT and Logo — enough to make it the number-one show on cable among 18-to-34-year-olds in its timeslot.
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Not surprisingly, Comedy Central delivered the biggest audience among them, with 5.9 million viewers tuning in.
In terms of ratings, “The Comedy Awards” delivered big double digit gains, up 80 percent among 18-to-49-year-olds (compared to the timeslot benchmark, 90 percent among 18-to-34-year-olds and 71 percent among men that age.
And, in a new media metric that advertisers increasingly care about, “The Comedy Awards” generated more than 21,000 mentions on Twitter on Sunday — boosted by Stephen Colbert and Norm Macdonald‘s “live-tweeting.”