For advertisers watching the holiday week and the end-of-year numbers, the story in national TV news is clear: ABC’s World News Tonight with David Muir remains the top-rated evening newscast, anchoring a dominant fourth quarter of 2025 and closing the year as broadcast’s largest daily audience in the category.
The notoriously soft stretch between Christmas and New Year’s once again produced uneven schedules and atypical viewing patterns, but even in that liminal week of Dec. 29, World News Tonight held its lead. The broadcast averaged 7.730 million total viewers, up 3% from the previous week, even as adults 25-54 slipped 3% to 883,000. Against the comparable week in 2024, ABC surged 11% in total viewers and held flat in the key news demo, a rare combination of year-over-year growth and stability in a fragmenting video landscape.
Zooming out to the full quarter, the scale of ABC’s advantage comes into sharper focus. According to Nielsen data, World News Tonight finished Q4 2025 with 7.862 million total viewers and 974,000 adults 25-54, making it not just the leading evening newscast but the top-rated broadcast in the daypart. Quarter-to-quarter, ABC grew its overall audience by 9% while remaining flat in the A25-54 demo, underscoring a base that is both broad and remarkably resilient. Versus Q4 2024, total viewership climbed 4% even as the demo drifted down 9%, a profile consistent with broader linear TV trends toward slightly older, but still massive, live audiences.
For media buyers and OOH planners, those numbers translate into one core advantage: reach. An average audience just under eight million viewers a night positions World News Tonight as one of television’s most reliable mass-reach platforms, especially for brands that need rapid, national-scale exposure around news-adjacent messaging. The holiday corridor, often a cluttered and compressed window for both advertisers and consumers, showed that the ABC franchise can still command appointment viewing even when regular routines are disrupted.
Yet the Q4 2025 story is not solely about ABC’s dominance; it is also about intensifying competition underneath it. NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas posted the most robust growth trajectory of the quarter, making meaningful gains in both total viewers and the A25-54 demo. NBC averaged 6.224 million total viewers and 848,000 adults 25-54 in Q4, up 12% and 8%, respectively, from the prior quarter—the only evening newscast to post growth in both measured categories. Year over year, the NBC broadcast was up 3% in total viewers, though down 5% in the demo, signaling that while it still trails ABC, it is closing the distance in absolute audience terms.
NBC’s own internal analysis reinforces that momentum. Network data show Nightly News averaging 6.187 million total viewers for the quarter, outdrawing CBS by more than two million viewers and marking the only evening newscast to grow in both total viewers and the adults 18-49 demo versus Q4 2024. NBC also reports that Nightly News narrowed its gaps with ABC in key demos, delivering its closest A25-54 and A18-49 positions in roughly five quarters. For advertisers, those shifts suggest a more competitive second option in the daypart—particularly for campaigns where demo efficiency and incremental reach beyond ABC are priorities.
CBS Evening News, by contrast, remains a more modest, but still sizable, player in the space. The broadcast averaged 4.031 million total viewers and 502,000 adults 25-54 in Q4 2025. Quarter-to-quarter, CBS managed a 6% lift in total viewers but slipped 4% in the demo, making it the only evening newscast to post a loss in either category over that period. The year-over-year picture is more challenging: down 12% in total viewers and 25% among adults 25-54 compared with Q4 2024. From a planning perspective, CBS offers a leaner, more efficient buy but with clearly smaller scale and softening momentum relative to its rivals.
The interplay between the late-December week and the quarterly numbers offers several signals for the OOH and cross-screen ecosystem. First, the stability of World News Tonight’s leadership—up during the holiday week, up for the quarter, and still No. 1 in both total viewers and the core news demo—confirms that linear evening news remains one of the last truly national common screens. For brands tying OOH flights to news-heavy tentpoles, leveraging ABC’s evening block alongside high-impact out-of-home placements continues to be a logical way to synchronize reach across in-home and on-the-go touchpoints.
Second, NBC’s accelerating growth in Q4, especially in younger and midlife demos, presents an opportunity to layer incremental frequency and audience diversity without sacrificing scale. As Nightly News narrows the gap with ABC, advertisers gain more flexibility to segment creative by network while still tapping into millions of nightly impressions. In markets where OOH dominates commutes and city centers, aligning local or digital OOH with NBC’s improving performance could help capture viewers as they move from public spaces into the evening news window.
Finally, the relative softness at CBS points to a more value-driven proposition. For cost-sensitive campaigns, placements around CBS Evening News—paired with targeted OOH in markets where CBS over-indexes—could deliver efficient GRPs even as the program trails in raw audience. But the gravitational center of the category remains unchanged: ABC’s World News Tonight with David Muir is still the benchmark broadcast, the top-rated evening news program of Q4 2025, and the primary linear anchor for brands seeking nationwide, time-sensitive reach at scale.