The U.S. presidential debates are always broadcasted on TV but if don’t happen to have one or simply prefer to watch the debate online, you have all kinds of different options now, as even Twitter has been streaming them. Interestingly, YouTube trumped TV in viewership numbers for the last debate. Twice as many people watched the debate on YouTube than those who watched it on conventional TV.
Official numbers released by Google show that the live debate and on-demand videos surrounding it generated more than 124 million views. This is a 40 percent increase from the first debate which generated 88 million views. Compare this to 63 million TV viewers and you can see what was the preferred medium to watch the second debate.
Most viewers came to YouTube to just watch the debate live and at one point there were more than 1.5 million peak concurrent viewers which was five times higher than the second presidential debate back in 2012.
Viewers watched the debate for 25 minutes on average and they came from across the globe. After the United States, Canda, Mexico, Australia, Great Britain, and Vietnam contributed the most viewers.
YouTube is also going to stream the third and final presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton which takes place in Las Vegas on Wednesday, October 19th.
Filed in . Read more about YouTube. Source: youtube.googleblog