On Our Minds: The Impact of a Tony Performance

We are in the home stretch to the Tony Awards?. Good luck to all the nominees out there!

As usual, we are sharing data that we hope will be helpful in benchmarking the impact of shows that have the good fortune of performing at the Tony Awards. Last year, the CBS broadcast of the Tony Awards drew 4.3 million viewers (and it’s worth remembering that it was an unscripted event due to the Writers Guild of America strike, and for a while, it was unclear if the Tony Awards would go on as scheduled). To what degree that affected actual viewership numbers is unknown and viewership, of course, greatly impacts these benchmarking numbers!

The data point we are sharing today focuses on the number of website sessions you can expect on your official website during the hour of your Tony performance. On average, we see that 40% of website sessions on Tony Sunday will come during the hour of a show’s performance. The performance is the biggest immediate driver of website traffic — even Best Musical and Best Musical Revival winners are likely to see more website traffic within the hour of their performance than in the hour they win that coveted award. Obviously, a more impactful performance is more likely to drive site traffic, however, we do generally see that those shows performing in the 9:00 pm hour tend to see more traffic than those in the 8:00 pm or 10:00 pm hour. The highest number of sessions during the hour of performance that we have ever seen is over 20,000!

Good luck to all those shows performing – we hope you crush these numbers!

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