Monday’s Emmy Awards, aired Monday by NBC, posted a 9% decline in audience from the show’s 2025 viewership, marking what appears to be the end of the Emmys broadcast-network era.
According to Nielsen’s preliminary audience estimate, 6.7 million viewers watched the Emmys this year, down from the 7.4 million who tuned in last year.
While the viewership of awards shows has been treading downward in recent years, several factors complicate efforts to draw solid conclusions about the cause of this year’s drop in Emmys audience from 2025:
- This year’s show was broadcast on a Monday, while last year’s aired on a Sunday.
- Compared to the last Monday broadcast of the Emmys, aired in 2024 by Fox, this year’s audience is 41% higher.
- The 2024 show took place in January, not in its usual September slot, because it was delayed due to Hollywood’s writers and actors strikes.
- The 2024 Monday show audience was hurt by competition from an NFL playoff game (the first time ever).
- This year’s show was up against a Monday Night Football game, while last year’s competed against Sunday Night Football.
- Compared to NBC’s last Monday night Emmys in 2022, the 2025 viewership is 10% higher.
- Monday’s Emmys show was largely devoid of the hateful, politically-charged leftist rhetoric that has turned off many viewers in recent years.
- Viewership of the Emmys across social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, X and YouTube) surged 90% from 2025, reaching a combined total of 133 million social views.
Additionally, an article by Variety employs three restrictions in its analysis to declare the 2026 Emmys “the most-watched non-sports, non-news Monday telecast of 2026, both overall and among adults age 18-49.”
This year’s Emmys show is likely the last to be aired by a broadcast network, Variety notes in a separate article:
“The Emmy ‘wheel’ is about to pop. According to insiders, the Television Academy is in advanced talks to park the annual Emmy telecast at Amazon Prime Video — taking the ceremony off broadcast TV for the first time since its start in 1949.
“It would end the 31-year tradition of rotating the ceremony annually between ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC, which has been referred to as a ‘wheel deal’ given its annual shift from network to network. NBC and Peacock aired this year’s 78th Emmys, which reps the last broadcast under the most recent ‘wheel deal,’ which was struck for eight years in 2018.”
If the Emmys do, indeed, move to Amazon, they will join other awards programs – such as the Oscars, SAG-AFTRA's Actor Awards and the Academy of Country Music (ACM) Awards – who have signed deals to move to a streaming service.
One advantage of signing a multi-year deal with a single outlet is that the platform would have more incentive to promote the show, since doing so won’t benefit the competitor who gets the Emmys the next year.
