Twitter: Trump-Clinton Second Debate Live Average Viewership Up 7%, Most-Tweeted Debate Ever
Twitter saw fireworks on its service Sunday with the second meeting of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, which registered as the most-tweeted debate ever with 17 million debate-related posts.
Sunday night’s livestream of the Bloomberg Politics broadcast had an average minute audience of 369,000 viewers, up 7% from 344,000 during the first presidential debate. (The AMA measure is roughly analogous to average TV audience ratings.) About 70% of Sunday night’s live viewers on Twitter were under the age of 35.
That comes as the U.S. TV audience for the Sunday debate was 21% lower than the Sept. 26 debate, per Nielsen. YouTube, meanwhile, reported that live and on-demand video views of the second Trump-Clinton debate were up 40% over the first meeting.
The presidential debates on Twitter have drawn bigger audiences than the social service’s much-ballyhooed NFL “Thursday Night Football” live streams. So far, Twitter’s largest audience for “TNF” was 327,000 average minute audience for the New England Patriots-Houston Texans game on Sept. 22.
Overall, Twitter’s livestream of Bloomberg Politics’ presidential debate broadcast on Sunday night reached 3.2 million unique viewers, an increase of 30% over the first presidential debate, which saw 2.5 million unique viewers. Twitter defines a unique viewer in this case as a person who watches the video 100% in view for at least three seconds. That viewership count includes pre- and post-debate coverage led by Bloomberg Politics managing editors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann and Washington bureau chief Megan Murphy.
The 17 million debate-related tweets sent Oct. 9 about the Trump-Clinton debate were seen more than 3.6 billion times worldwide on and off of Twitter, according to the company. Sunday was also the most-tweeted day of the entire 2016 election season, with nearly 30 million tweets.
Twitter said ad inventory for all four debates (running in pre- and post-debate coverage) has sold out. According to the company, its midroll ads in Bloomberg shows have over-delivered on impression guarantees by 377% with still one debate left to go, the Oct. 19 meeting of the presidential hopefuls in Las Vegas.
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