Niagara Falls Tightrope Walk Is a Ratings Bonanza for ABC

The live telecast of a tightrope walk over Niagara Falls on Friday night did exactly what ABC hoped: it lifted the network to a first-place finish for the night and provided evidence that there’s an audience out there hungry for big television stunts.

ABC easily surpassed NBC, CBS and the other broadcasters for the night. From 10:30 to 11 p.m., when the daredevil Nik Wallenda finished his walk, ABC netted 13.1 million viewers, according to preliminary Nielsen ratings.

According to ABC’s own research, the network had not seen a rating that high on a Friday in nearly five years. Shows on Friday night typically earn low ratings, especially in the summertime.

Executives at ABC News, which produced the event, will surely cite the ratings the next time they propose a big network stunt — and odds are it won’t be very long. Friday’s broadcast ended with Mr. Wallenda telling viewers at home, “I just happen to have the permit to be the first person in the world to walk a tightrope over the Grand Canyon. And we’ll start up that process very soon.” Josh Elliott, one of the hosts of the broadcast, responded, “Well, Nik, if you’re looking for a network, I think I have one in mind.”

The half-hour walk was stretched into a three-hour-long extravaganza by ABC News: the 8 p.m. hour looked back at “mega stunts” of the past, the 9 p.m. hour previewed Mr. Wallenda’s walk over the falls, and the 10 p.m. hour showed the walk itself. On any given minute between 9 and 11 p.m., 10.1 million viewers were watching, according to Nielsen. Mr. Wallenda made the stunt look easy, practically running the last few steps.

It was “a truly beautiful spectacle,” James Goldston, the ABC News executive who was overseeing the production at Niagara Falls, wrote in an email message minutes after Mr. Wallenda stepped off the highwire and into Canada.

The broadcast itself was “tons of fun,” he wrote, but also “incredibly technically complex,” with production crews, hosts and cameras in both the United States and Canada.

The broadcast was a huge opportunity for the network news division, but also a risk, given the possibility that Mr. Wallenda might be injured or killed — which is why it was shown with a five-second delay. ABC also required Mr. Wallenda to wear a harness, which he openly disdained, even remarking at one point during his walk that he felt like a “jackass” for having to wear it. But without ABC, he might not have been able to walk at all; the network helped to pay for the event.

Not surprisingly, the television audience gradually grew as the night went on. ABC had a 1.2 rating among 18- to 49-year-olds at 8 p.m.; a 1.3 rating at 8:30; a 1.7 rating at 9; and a 1.8 rating at 9:30. At 10 p.m., as Mr. Wallenda started his walk, the rating spiked to a 3.1; at 10:30, it topped out at a 3.4.

The walk was a momentary phenomena on Twitter and Facebook, as viewers watched and chatted about it simultaneously. Data collected by ABC after the broadcast showed that there were 353,000 messages on Twitter about the high-wire walk between 10 and 11 p.m. — exponentially more than the news division has seen for other special events like concerts. The Twitter messages peaked when Mr. Wallenda stepped into Canada, with 14,000 messages a minute.