Jimmy Fallon & Seth Meyers See Major Ratings Boosts From Taylor Swift Appearances

A certain showgirl brought razzle-dazzle to The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and Late Night With Seth Meyers last week, as Taylor Swift delivered big ratings on both of NBC’s late-night talk shows.

Swift’s appearance on The Tonight Show on Monday, October 6, gave Jimmy Fallon his biggest audience for a regular episode since Greg Gutfield appeared on the show in August, according to LateNighter. Nielsen Live+3 Day data showed that 1.77 million viewers tuned in, up 44 percent over the previous Monday.

Even better, Swift upped The Tonight Show’s 18-to-49-year-old audience from 161,000 to 242,000 week over week, an increase of 50 percent. That’s also the show’s best performance in that demo, an important one for advertisers, in eight months.

Swift’s takeover of Late Night on Wednesday, October 8, attracted 993,000 total viewers, including 175,000 in the 18-to-49 demo, according to Nielsen Live+Same Day data cited by LateNighter.

Those metrics are up 13 percent and 27 percent, respectively, over the Late Night’s performance a week earlier, and they mark Seth Meyers’ best 18-to-49 audience since January.

Swift made her late-night blitz to promote The Life of a Showgirl, her twelfth studio album. Despite mixed reviews from music critics — Rolling Stone said Swift “hits all her marks” on the album, while The Guardian called it “nowhere near as good as it should be given Swift’s talents” — TLOS broke the modern-era record for most albums sold in the first week in the United States, according to Billboard.

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Additionally, the promotional film Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl opened to $34 million domestically and $50 million worldwide last weekend, topping the U.S. box office, as AMC Theatres touted.

Swift has boosted TV ratings before her Showgirl era. In September 2023, for instance, the pop star’s appearance at a Kansas City Chiefs–Chicago Bears game in support of her now-fiancé, Chiefs star Travis Kelce, gave the NFL showdown more than 24 million viewers and ratings highs for 12-to-17-year-old and 18-to-49-year-old female viewers, Variety reported at the time.