Media

Final numbers show record-setting viewership for debate

by Joe Concha - 09/28/16 8:50 AM ET

Monday night’s debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was watched by 84 million people on television and about nine million more online, final numbers from Nielsen show.

{mosads}The previous debate TV record was 80.6 million, set in 1980 for the only debate between President Jimmy Carter and Republican challenger Ronald Reagan.

This week’s debate easily beat the first 2012 debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney, which had a total of about 70 million TV viewers.

NBC led the way among broadcast networks, while Fox News won the overall viewers race on cable. Here are the final overall numbers broken down by audience size per network:

» NBC: 18.2 million

» ABC: 13.5 million

» CBS: 12.1 million

» Fox News: 11.4 million

» CNN: 9.8 million

» MSNBC: 4.9 million

» PBS: 2.96 million

» Fox Business Network: 673,000

» CNBC: 520,000

Interest in the debate was unprecedented on the digital side as well.

“In terms of the social nature of the debate, there were 17.1 million Twitter interactions from 2.7 million people in the U.S. related to the ‘Presidential Debate’ on Monday, Sept. 26, 2016,” according to Nielsen Research.

Twitter called the Monday night event “the most tweeted debate ever.” The company said it exceeded the 10.3 million Tweets sent during the first Obama-Romney 2012 debate.

Facebook reported on Tuesday that it drew nearly 55 million people to debate-centric live videos on its social network.

YouTube livestreams registered more than 2.5 million simultaneous viewers.

Other livestream numbers aren’t available, but analysts expect to total number of viewers to be in the 93 million range when combining broadcast and online numbers.

Tags Donald Trump Hillary Clinton