She pushed hard, but Jordan Chiles wasn’t the one to lift the Len Goodman Mirrorball trophy. ‘The Princess’ aced the judges’ round and had perfect scores throughout the night except for a 29/30 in the Instant Dance. Her final score was 89/90. She now stands at the third position behind Robert Irwin & Witney Carson and Alix Earle & Val Chmerkovskiy. Despite missing the trophy, the gymnastics star played a key role in Dancing With The Stars’ history-making finale.

This year’s Dancing With the Stars finale was indeed one of a kind. According to Nielsen Ratings, the Season 34 finale drew 9.24 million viewers. This is the show’s most-watched finale in over a decade. It also marked a season high, easily surpassing the 7.22 million viewers recorded the previous week. The last time the show hit numbers this large was in November 2016, when the finale reached 10.97 million viewers.

The adults seemed to have loved this season’s finale, and the numbers prove it. The show delivered its strongest adults 18–49 finale ratings since 2015 and its best performance among adults 18–34 since 2011, marking a rare double high for the franchise in the modern era. That’s not all, the fan voting shattered the records as well, as per the data, over 72 million votes cast on the finale, reaching half a billion votes this season.

If we look at the season-wide average, Dancing With the Stars pulled in just under 6.5 million same-day viewers, its strongest performance since Season 28 in 2019. That’s not all. Overall viewership jumped by 33 percent, driven largely by the enthusiastic 18–49 demographic. Among adults in that key bracket, ratings didn’t just climb, they surged by a staggering 82 percent.

Season 34 was an undeniable success, thanks largely to the stars who lit up the ballroom beyond anything fans expected. Jordan Chiles has been central to that momentum. Beyond her DWTS performances, she also took the spotlight at the Bruins–Pepperdine basketball game, delivering a halftime routine that electrified the crowd and packed Pauley Pavilion.

Social media interaction spiked dramatically, helping DWTS break through to a wider online audience. Showrunner Conrad Green credited the digital buzz for fueling much of this season’s momentum, while casting director Deena Katz continued to bring in influencers and creators to keep the show culturally plugged in.

Jordan Chiles and others made sure that DWTS gets all the social media glitter

Casting director Deena Katz told The Hollywood Reporter that the team was genuinely concerned about converting social media views into television ratings, “We’ve forever tried to figure out for such a long time, as long as social media has been around, how putting somebody [like an influencer] on a show wouldn’t bring their audience over. It was so frustrating: Why do they have this many followers, but it doesn’t turn into viewers on TV?”

Those worries were valid, she noted, but the show eventually found its solution through TikTok, “What has happened is the TikTok world has opened something up that I’ve never seen before, where we are so involved in the TikTok story every single week that there’s a whole new audience that needed to start watching our show to keep up with what was going on in social media.”

Well, they weren’t alone. Every contestant, including Jordan Chiles, consistently promoted the show across Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat. The personal backstories shared on these platforms captured fan interest and ultimately drew viewers to tune in on television.

Well, the final same-day ratings are yet to be revealed by the Nielsen Ratings and will be released in a few days; that final report might increase the viewership of the show.  Given that, what was your favorite moment from season 34?