How Well Did Sharknado Actually Do?

The real popularity of Sharknado, beyond Twitter hype.

In case you were on Twitter a few nights ago, there was a show on SyFy called Sharknado. It was, as you might expect, about sharks getting caught in a tornado. If you judged it's popularity by Twitter alone you would have thought the whole world was watching. That, however, turns out not to be the case:

But Sharknado may have broken the mold; the movie blew up on Twitter last night, giving the impression that everyone with a TV was watching it. “Omg omg OMG‪ #sharknado,” Mia Farrow tweeted last night, while Washington Post political reporter Chris Cillizza joked that he was writing an article about how Sharknado would affect the 2016 elections. But were all these people actually watching? According to the Los Angeles Times, Sharknado was watched by only 1 million people, which makes it a bust, even by Syfy standards. Most Syfy originals have an average viewership of 1.5 million people, with some getting twice that.

[Via Washington Post]