MTV landed its biggest U.S. audience ever for Sunday’s European Music Awards when 1.2 million people tuned in to watch the broadcast on the U.S. channel.

They also scored an outpouring of social media chatter (57.9 million mentions) and 40 percent bump in its core 12-24 demographic over last year.

But nowhere in their release touting their record numbers did MTV thank the likely reason for their great night: Miley Cyrus.

As Deadline’s Lisa de Moraes pointed out Tuesday, MTV’s spike in ratings over last year is likely due to the fact that blogs and social media started exploding with the news from the show in Amsterdam that Miley had lit up what appeared to be a joint when she took the stage to accept an award.

Given that the U.S. is several time zones behind Amsterdam, enough buzz likely built over the ensuing hours to drive tune-in to the network and its website once the broadcast started Stateside.

Unfortunately for those U.S. viewers, MTV scrubbed the joint-lighting from it’s American broadcast, despite the fact that they had been promoting Miley as the main event at the show (de Moraes also pointed out that MTV’s promos posed the teasing question “How Wild Will Miley Get at the EMAs.”

Miley, of course, earned global notoriety at the EMA’s sister show in The States when she staged her twerking-with-Robin-Thicke-and-giant-bears performance at August’s MTV Video Music Awards. So the network probably knew they had publicity gold on their hands when Miley agreed to show at the Amsterdam gig.

Regardless of why they tuned in, the show generated 2 million page views to its website on the day of the show, a 1000 percent increase over last year. Day-after page views were up 180 percent over last year to 1.3 million.

The EMAs delivered 10 trending topics on social media, and fans cast 292 million votes across all EMA platforms to help determine winners—a 59 percent increase over last year.

Read More: Deadline

Brief Take: Millennial viewers will gladly tune-in and log on, even for an overseas awards show, if they’re teased with a hint of controversy.

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