Jimmy Kimmel hosted President Donald Trump on his shown years ago. Trump celebrated the comedian’s suspension following remarks he made about Charlie Kirk’s death.
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Jimmy Kimmel ratings over the years have dropped—which hardly makes him unique or says anything about his popularity. The comedian, whose late-night Jimmy Kimmel Live! show was suspended by ABC earlier this week following fallout surrounding his comments about the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, experienced the same decline in viewership suffered by virtually everything on television.
And actually, the most recent round of numbers for Kimmel were positive. He moved slightly ahead of rival The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which CBS recently cancelled, among adults ages 18-49 – the key demographic for advertisers. They base their ad sales on how many viewers shows pull in that group.
Kimmel averaged 220,000 adults 18-49 during the second quarter (three months ended June 30), according to data from Nielsen. That was 1,000 more than Colbert and marked Kimmel’s strongest performance with the demo in a year.
By comparison, NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon averaged 157,000 in that time, well behind Kimmel and Colbert.
A ratings rise of any kind is notable in 2025. Changes in viewing patterns, with more people now watching streaming video than traditional television, have cratered ratings for virtually every show on television. Even the most popular franchises, like NCIS and Law & Order, have seen ratings drop precipitously from a decade ago—and even more from the 2000s, when Kimmel’s show debuted.
Jimmy Kimmel Ratings Over The Years Have Fallen
So it’s no surprise that Jimmy Kimmel ratings have dropped. During second quarter, he averaged 1.77 million total viewers (his strength has always been 18-49s). That’s down quite a bit from 2015, when Colbert joined the late-night lineup and Nielsen says Kimmel averaged 2.4 million total viewers.
But again, every show is down since then. And there are many different ways to spin those numbers, as headlines from all manner of politically affiliated media have done since Kimmel’s suspension. You can look at second quarter and say he was up or look at the long game and say he was down.
On YouTube, where Kimmel’s channel has more than 20 million subscribers, his three most recent videos have all garnered more than 3 million views, suggesting a wider audience than on TV—again, this doesn’t make him special in the current TV landscape with viewers migrating online.
Jimmy Kimmel ratings have dropped over the years, but the comedian finished first among adults 18-49 during second quarter of this year.
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Jimmy Kimmel Ratings Weren’t The Real Issue: Trump, Nextstar and Disney Complications
ABC did not even try to pretend it was pulling Kimmel for any reason other than the financial impact and backlash from its affiliates, including owner Nextstar, which owns more than two dozen ABC stations and is looking for regulatory approval for a $6.2 billion purchase of Tegna. President Donald Trump suggested that the Federal Communications Commission could even revoke TV broadcasters’ licenses for “bad publicity,” though the legality of such a move is questionable. And ABC owner Disney has its own regulatory concerns with the agreement to merge Fubo with its Hulu + Live TV.
The comedian vs. the state controversy is certainly nothing new historically. Mike Fontaine, a professor of classics at Cornell University, notes that there is a long history of comedians being silenced for speaking truth to power.
“Canceling comedians is a defining feature of authoritarianism,” he said. “When ‘offending the sovereign’ becomes synonymous with ‘treason,’ you know we’ve crossed a bright red line. This has always been true in the West.”
He cites examples dating back to ancient Greece, noting that even Roman leaders weren’t above retribution against those who made fun of them.
“The Greek philosopher Plutarch, whose insights were cited by the Founding Fathers again and again, warned us of three famous cases,” said Fontaine. “One is the poet Sotades, who found himself clapped into prison—and later murdered—for cracking a joke about an Egyptian pharaoh. Another is Theocritus of Chios, executed for teasing his one-eyed king. And not least is the Roman statesman Cicero, hunted down and murdered for mocking Mark Antony.”
He notes that Athens was a democracy, and citizens enjoyed a “wide latitude” to express opinions. Athenian stage comedians often broke the fourth wall to comment on current politics, with the people they were critiquing sitting right in front of them.
“The concepts of free speech and comedy as we know it were both born in classical Athens in the 5th century BCE. Free speech and comedy were two sides of the same coin,” he observes.
Things were different in Ancient Rome, whose first emperor “allegedly” exiled poet Ovid based on his racy humor.
Hundreds of years later, Voltaire was similarly silenced. “In the Enlightenment, the best example of punishing wit is Voltaire. He was locked in the Bastille for his satirical writings. Abuses like that eventually led to support for the French Revolution,” said Fontaine. It underscores how such censorship can backfire.