Live Streaming the Presidential Debate
The 2016 election is heating up. We’re down to two candidates and November is mere weeks away. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump went face to face this week in the first of three presidential debates. Nielsen reported 84 million people tuning into the debate via television. This debate broke the record for most debate viewers – previously held by Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan in 1980.
While this is an impressive statistic, it does not factor in those that live-streamed the event. Read on for more information as we dig deeper into facts and findings from the first presidential debate.
YouTube reported 2 million live, concurrent streams of the debate.
Though Twitter is not releasing data regarding viewership numbers, YouTube does — and livestream brought in an additional 2 million viewers. To broadcast their stream, YouTube partnered with six different broadcast networks for the best coverage possible. Altogether, more than 3 million hours of the debate were watched live. Broadcasting & Cable notes, “YouTube says this breaks all political programming records for live streaming and is one of the biggest livestreams of all time. Compared to four years ago, this debate had 14 times more live viewers, five times more watch time and 4 times more peak concurrent viewers.”
Facebook’s stream of ABC’s debate coverage received a collective 8 million views.
While Facebook isn’t releasing how many unique visitors made up those collective 8 million views, the viewership was obviously strong. CBSN, CBS’s 24/7 digital news streaming service saw 1.4 million unique viewers tune in for a total of 2.98 million streams.
Both candidates received 3.1 million Twitter mentions during the debate timeframe.
With 313 million users, Twitter was full of debate-related tweets on Monday night. The top 10 trending topics were related to the debate and 50 percent of those tweeting about the debate were under the age of 25. In September, Twitter partnered with Bloomberg to bring the event to its users — free of charge. While Twitter is not releasing data about unique viewers or streams, the company remains pleased with the quality of its work. On the other hand, other sources find Twitter’s lack of transparency to be inauthentic, noting that the ratings were perhaps not as great as Twitter thought they would be.
After what was said and debated on Monday night, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will face off two more times before Election Day in November. It is unclear whether the next two debates will garner as much attention and as many viewers as the first, but two things are clear. They will be talked about and they will be available via livestream.
Do you plan on streaming the debate live this Sunday night?