Live September events like the 2021 Met Gala, New York Fashion Week, and the Emmys drove engagement on E! News’ digital platform, E! Online, to an all-time high across social sites, and its owned-and-operated platforms.

In fact, this year’s Met Gala became the top-performing Live From E! event on record for E! News digital. The event reached 172.4 million cross-platform engagements, nearly doubling the numbers compared with 2019.

Tammy Filler, executive vice president and editor-in-chief of E! News, attributes the success to “constantly optimizing our learnings, innovating and evolving.”

Filler said that in September 2021, the team analyzed results from Fashion Week and adjusted the strategy for Met Gala. They also did the same for Emmys.

“In the digital space, you can’t rest on your laurels,” she said. “You must keep adapting for your users to stay engaged and to provide them with the content they are looking for. These results prove that our audience is craving live event content more than ever.”

Last month, E! Online, overall delivered 66 million visits, 45 million unique visitors, and 192 million page views in the U.S. On social sites — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok — the company achieved 77 million total engagements.

These social sites generated more than 209 million likes, shares, social video views, and social content across the E! Social portfolio for content related to New York Fashion Week, Met Gala, and Emmys.

Social videos racked up more than 189 million views, and 18.5 million minutes were watched across all three red-carpet events.

From E! News owned and operated, to YouTube and Twitter, these red-carpet September 2021 events experienced 8.6 million views, and 13.5 million watched minutes. 

“We have also shifted our editorial tone,” Filler said. “We’re celebrating Hollywood and giving our audience access behind the velvet rope by fueling the conversation in a funny and opinionated manner that is inclusive of everyone craving pop culture content.”

When asked to cite the type of content visitors interact with most, Filler said it’s typically platform dependent and driven by the most popular entertainment news on any given day, but the fandom gravitates toward celebrity news, lifestyle and trends, Fashion, Music and viral user-generated content.  

Which one of the social media sites provides the best performance for what type of content?

“We are the No. 1 Entertainment brand on social,” she said. “We just hit 18 million followers on Instagram, however, all of our platforms are important to us, and each one allows us to target a different fanbase. We have an extremely strong following across social from Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube and Pinterest.”

E! News doesn’t use search advertising, but it does lean on search engine optimization and organic search.

“We are just beginning to lean into Instagram Shop and starting to partner directly with retailers to drive this ecommerce experience,” she said. Stay tuned.