New Data Indicates That ‘SNL’ May Be a YouTube Show Above All Else
For many SNL fans, watching the show live from New York on Saturday nights is merely a suggestion.
According to new data from Digital i, Saturday Night Live’s YouTube channel dominated the platform throughout the first half of 2025, drawing in 38.6 million unique viewers in the U.S., and beating out its closest competitors of ABC News, NBC News and YouTube’s movies page by millions of users. The term “SNL” also topped the app’s list of popular searches, outperforming Super Bowl halftime headliner Kendrick Lamar, who appears on the list twice, as well as YouTube superstars like Ms. Rachel and MrBeast.
But SNL isn’t just outpacing its digital competitors. It’s also besting itself.
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The Season 50 premiere last fall brought in SNL’s largest audience in four years with 5.3 million viewers. On YouTube, the episode’s opening monologue alone garnered upwards of 12 million views, with several other sketches also surpassing the one million mark.
Lorne Michaels is looking to further expand the show’s internet stronghold elsewhere as well. Michaels, who recently tapped TikTok star Veronika Slowikowska for the show’s upcoming Season 51 cast, explained that a social media presence has helped SNL’s audience.
“The show has always brought people in from different ages and different generations, and it’s how it revives itself,” Michaels told Entertainment Tonight, per Deadline. “It’s always hard when people leave but there’s a time for that, and our audiences always stayed relatively young and more so now with TikTok, and change is good.”
So maybe the show’s opening line should be, “Live from your social platform of choice, it’s Saturday night”?
