NBC’s Lester Holt Replacement Loses First Ratings Battle

NBC’s Nightly News lost viewers in anchor Tom Llamas’ first month as he took the reins from Lester Holt, while his ex-ABC colleague David Muir saw his ratings at ABC’s World News Tonight increase.

Llamas, 46, started his run on June 2. The show’s June ratings averaged around 5.674 million viewers, down from the 66-year-old Holt’s final average at 5.708 million viewers. It also saw a slight drop in viewers in the advertiser-coveted 25-54 demographic, dropping from 828,000 viewers to 823,000 as Holt left the program on May 30.

MUIR LED World News Tonight to increase its lead over Nightly News between May and June, growing from 7.24 million to 7.308 million in total viewers.

World News Tonight remained the top-rated evening news program in June, though its averages this June were drawn from shortened weeks as the NBA Finals on ABC preempted the show. World News Tonight aired 17 times in June, while Nightly News aired 23 times.

Muir also carried World News Tonight to its largest lead in more than 30 years over NBC Nightly News through the year’s second quarter, though Holt hosted the show through most of that tenure.

Llamas’ slight dip, which is similar to last year’s widened gap, indicates the headwinds Llamas faces in growing an audience and beating his former ABC colleague Muir in a time where viewers are pivoting away from linear television, particularly when a sizable gap between World News Tonight and Nightly News has existed for a decade.

Llamas, who left ABC for NBC in 2021 and had long been considered the frontrunner to replace Holt, told The Washington Post in June that he does “want to be number one.” He conceded, however, that his goal was “not going to happen in a month.”

“I don’t know when it’s going to happen,” he said. “But I believe it will happen.”

Llamas has seen some encouraging signs.

Nightly News marked three consecutive weeks of total viewer growth toward the end of June, and its 25-54 demo gap narrowed to its closest gap in five years, indicating NBC’s promotional blitz of putting Llamas nearly everywhere may have had some effect. (Muir countered the move with a sit-down with People in late May, days before Llamas’ start date.)

Its 823,000 demo average last month was also up from June 2024, which saw 774,000 viewers tune in throughout a turbulent, pre-election news cycle—though Llamas lost 10,000 viewers compared to last year.

NBC News had no comment, though it has touted Llamas’ growth in its public releases and has demonstrated its confidence in him by flying him to Texas on Sunday to anchor coverage of the deadly flash floods that have so far taken the lives of more than 100 people. Llamas also anchors his daily show, Top Story, on NBC News Now, the network’s streaming service.

NBC has managed to avoid the precipitous drop that followed CBS News’ efforts to revamp CBS Evening News once anchor Norah O’Donnell left the program earlier this year, indicating Llamas has room to expand his share of the market.

The first three weeks of its new lineup of John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois saw the show lose hundreds of thousands of viewers, and its June 2025 average of 3.943 million total viewers was down from its June 2024 average of 4.380 million. In the 25-54 demo, its June average was 524,000 viewers, down from its June 2024 total of 606,000.