Monday morning was not just a great day for CBS ratings. ViacomCBS’ stock soared to a new high on Monday, following Oprah Winfrey’s high-rated primetime interview of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.
Shares of ViacomCBS stock ended the trading day (1 p.m. ET) with a price of $83.66 a share, an increase of 12.7% from the morning and a new record high for the less than two-year-old company (Viacom and CBS merged at the end of 2019).
The two-hour interview, in which the couple explained their decision to “step back” as members of the British royal family last year, drew more than 17 million viewers. That is closer to what regular season NFL games pull in than pretty much everything else on broadcast TV (it was more than triple than what NBC drew for the Golden Globes in that same timeslot a week ago).
That robust (preliminary) number is also larger than Caitlyn Jenner’s sitdown with Diane Sawyer on ABC in 2015, which (preliminarily) averaged a whopping 16.9 million total viewers.
You can read some of the most explosive allegations here.
ViacomCBS stock has been a on a tear of late — Monday was the stock’s seventh straight day of gains — and comes on the heels of last week’s Paramount+ launch. The stock price has more than doubled since the first day of trading this year (Jan. 4).