TV’s Top Twitter Moments Of 2015: Kanye, Super Bowl & The Walking Dead

Kayne West crashed the Twitter TV party in 2015.

Kayne’s announcement at the MTV Video Music Awards that he will run for President of the United States in 2020 spawned the most tweeted-about moment of the year, according to data from Nielsen. There were 248,000 tweets in the minute following his announcement — it was facetious, right? — surpassing the 243,000 tweets sent at 8:19 p.m. during the Super Bowl telecast in February.

The Kayne spectacle helped push the VMAs to record engagement on Twitter, even as the show’s overall Nielsen ratings plunged by 500,000 over 2014. The 21 million tweets were the most for a non-sports program since Nielsen started tracking the stats in 2011. In terms of total Twitter audience, the VMAs had 11 million uniques, third behind the Grammy Awards (13.3 million) and the Academy Awards (13.0 million).

NBC’s broadcast of the Super Bowl, which again led the overall Nielsen ratings for the year with an average audience of 115 million viewers, had a Twitter audience of 16.1 million and generated 25 million tweets.

For the third year in a row, an AMC program topped Nielsen’s list for top series, but for the second consecutive year, the Twitter TV audience dropped. In 2013, six million tweets were seen about the average Breaking Bad episode. Last year, The Walking Dead spawned views from 4.9 million people per show. The Walking Dead led again this year, with 3.9 million people sending an average of 424,000 Tweets about each episode. That’s down from 576,000 per episode in 2014.