Vogue’s Met Gala Livestream Notched 53 Million Views in 24 Hours

On the first Monday in May, more than 53 million people across the globe tuned in to watch Vogue’s third livestream of the Met Gala, the annual fashion extravaganza that serves as both the primary source of funding for the museum’s Costume Institute and, increasingly, a tentpole event for Condé Nast.

Within the first 24 hours, the livestream doubled its reach from the year prior and notched an average watch time of 21 minutes, according to Anna-Lisa Yabsley, global digital strategy lead and executive director of content strategy at Vogue.

Over the seven-day period following the event, the publisher generated 1.2 billion video views and 650 million social video views—up 82% and 30% year over year, respectively. 

The publisher broadcast the livestream across all of its 11 owned and operated Vogue websites, as well as on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and, for the first time, YouTube.

The continued growth of the Met Gala livestream and its attendant social footprint offer a case study in the blurring boundary between digital, social and linear video, as well as insight into the increasing nuance of publishers’ digital subscription strategies. 

“The subscription side of it was new for us this year,” Yabsley said. “And we wanted to leverage the interest around the Met Gala to see what kind of subscription activity that drove for us.”

Flooding the zone

As viewership to traditional award show broadcasts continues to decline, Vogue has managed to grow its audience for three consecutive years, a testament to its “surround sound” approach to content strategy.

Rather than shepherd viewership to a designated medium, Vogue floods every major distribution channel to inject Met Gala content into whichever feed a user prefers. 

To capitalize on this deluge of content, the publisher employed three primary strategies, according to Yabsley.

It streamlined content coordination across the global Vogue properties, ensuring that titles like Vogue Germany, India, Italy, Japan and Mexico had real-time access to the content coming from the event. In total, 48% of the content that appeared in Vogue U.S. was shared globally.

The publisher also placed more emphasis on its pre-event search engine optimization strategy. Drawing on the search equity of Vogue, it worked to capture more traffic from search inquiries related to the event, such as its history and how people could watch it. 

Finally, during the event itself, all Vogue properties globally housed Met Gala content in a centralized hub on its website, so visitors looking for anything found everything in one location. The title also increased its overall content output by 8% year over year, according to Yabsley.

Translating traffic into revenue

Both domestically and globally, Vogue took in a traffic windfall during the Gala.

In the seven-day period following the event, Vogue properties brought in 26 million total visitors, and its U.S. domain attracted 3.6 million readers to its red carpet gallery article—making it the most-read story in Vogue history, according to Yabsley.

To monetize the influx of readership, Vogue struck sponsorship deals with brands including Starbucks, eBay and Chanel, and the publisher created custom assets for the event.

In addition to advertising, the publisher placed a greater emphasis this year on growing its nascent digital subscription product, which it launched only six months ago. (Its Vogue Club membership, a distinct offering, is two years old.)

Met Gala coverage remained free to access the entire night, but if readers moved to explore other content, some would encounter a dynamic paywall.

Last year, Vogue had no digital subscription product, so it focused on presenting visitors with a registration wall to increase its pool of logged-in readers. This year, readers hit a proper paywall, and the number of digital subscribers it produced was 44% higher than the number of registrations it generated in 2022, according to Yabsley.

In addition, the publisher generated a nearly identical number of general newsletter sign-ups—100,000—as it did last year, further expanding its top-of-funnel audience.

“The Gala is always about engaging existing users and engaging new ones, but this year we really made headway in diversifying what that acquisition looks like,” Yabsley said.