The Miss USA Pageant Did Just OK in the Ratings Despite the Donald Trump Controversy

The ratings are in for the Miss USA pageant, and considering all the drama, they're just ok.

Without a big network to air on — or owner/walking liability Donald Trump in attendance — the pageant's ratings goals had to be lower than before. Reelz, the cable channel that picked the pageant up from NBC and Univision, paid less than $100,000 for the pageant, according to the Wrap, which pales in comparison to the millions NBC would have reportedly spent.

Still, with only 925,000 viewers watching, compared to the several million for previous years, this has to come as a disappointment. It's a good result for the circumstance, but a bad one historically.

An additional 38,000 viewers watched a YouTube live stream of the pageant, though that number only accounts for the program's peak at the end of the pageant. Compare those ratings to the 1.3 million who watched a live-streaming broadcast of this year's Super Bowl, the Wrap reported.

The total of just under a million viewers paled in comparison to last year's number: 5.5 million viewers watching on NBC. The previous year drew 4.6 million. There was one arena where the pageant won the day, however: the realm of tweeting. The broadcast reached the top of the Twitter ratings for the week.

NBC made the choice to fire Trump and expunge all his programming from its schedule shortly before the pageant was set to air. This led to a bit of a mad scramble, with Reelz being the beneficiary. The tiny network doesn't usually even report ratings, as a network representative told Mic via email, so this is a definitive win for them.

As for Trump, despite not having his party's backing and drawing the ire of brands like NASCAR, he charges onward. He currently leads the field of Republican presidential candidates. Something tells us he's not crying over the ratings today. He's got bigger gaffes to make.