Last Friday, MSNBC replaced its normal 8 and 9pm duo of Hayes and Maddow with a Morning Joe At Night special from Phoenix. The normal views of Hayes and Maddow were upset (and took to Twitter to complain), but how did the show do in terms of ratings?

Not well.

“In the demo”, the show pulled in 65K viewers in the 8pm hour and 72K in the 9pm hour. This was lower than the show beforehand (117K for Matthews in Phoenix), and the show afterwards (82K for the usual weekend crime documentary).  These ratings are about a third lower than the average viewership Hayes & Maddow have had in January:

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At the time of the airing, I thought it seemed like just an excuse to take a road trip.  Now it looks like a bad excuse for a road trip.

Sunday was an unusually quiet day in Cable News Twitter, with The Melissa Harris-Perry show winning best hour with less than 1000 mentions in each of its two hours.  Fox News’ Red Eye racked up an impressive 8K of mentions during the day, although most of those were retweets of Red Eye’s hosts’ comments during the Super Bowl and not exactly Red Eye related.

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Raw Data: 2015-02-01-ShowStats.csv

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It’s no surprise that Fox News’ Cashin’ In had another strong Saturday, with over 5,000 mentions during the 11am hour and over 15,000 mentions throughout the day.  Cashin’ In had a reach of 129,914,290, which means that tweets mentioning the show appeared on people’s timelines ~130 million times yesterday. (That is not to say people saw or read them, to be clear, just that they scrolled by).

Following Cashin’ In for best hour were both hours of Melissa Harris-Perry, Judge Jeanine, and both hours of Up with Steve. Cashin’ In had more mentions, during its slot, than these next-best shows did during their slots.

Here’s the top 30 shows:

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Raw data: 2015-01-31-ShowStats.csv

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Friday was an interesting day in Cable News (and Cable News Twitter).  Superficially, it looked like a fairly typical day: the Kelly File won best hour and Hannity best day.  But there were some permutations to MSNBC’s schedule that affected the runners-up.

After Kelly for best hour came each of the two hours of Morning Joe at Night, a superbowl special shot in Phoenix.   There was a lot of grumbling on Twitter about its replacing Hayes and Maddow.  In fact, Maddow got more mentions during her normal 9pm slot (1465) than Morning Joe did (1427).  Chris Hayes got almost as many mentions (1651) in his 8pm slot as Morning Joe did (1705).  It will be interesting to see how the ratings shake out when they surface; I suspect that the deployment to Phoenix did not boost MSNBC’s viewership.  Honestly, it seemed more like an excuse for some MSNBC personalities to take a road trip…

Here’s the top 30 shows on Cable News Twitter, as measured by best hour:

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Raw data for day: 2015-01-30-ShowStats.csv

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The Five (when you count mentions of its hosts’ accounts) had the best day overall on Cable News Twitter, and The Kelly File had the best hour.  Following Kelly were Hayes, Hannity, Schultz, and Maddow.  This represents a resurgent MSNBC which has been rather weak on Twitter recently.  The full top 30:

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Raw data: 2015-01-29-ShowStats.csv

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