While TV ratings for the second presidential debate, held on Sunday at Washington University, experienced a slight dropoff from the first — a 20% decline from roughly 80 million viewers to 60 million — the tune-in numbers for debate-related videos on YouTube painted a vastly different picture.
Videos of the second debate, including live, traditional, and related YouTube clips, have been watched a total of 124 million times since Sunday, the company wrote in a blog post. This represents a 40% increase in viewership over the first debate, which accounted for 88 million views. And viewers from all over the globe were tuning in — Canada, Mexico, Australia, Great Britain, and Vietnam were the most engaged countries after the U.S. All told, average watch-time of the second presidential debate on YouTube was 25 minutes.
“Of course, many viewers came to YouTube to watch the debate live,” writes news and politics executive Brandon Feldman, “and we saw over 1.5 million peak concurrent viewers, 5 times higher than the second presidential debate in 2012, and over 2.5 million live watch hours, nearly 6 times higher than 2012.”
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While CNN notes that the ratings drop on TV from the first debate to the second was likely the result of a Sunday Night Football game and the increasingly negative tenor of the campaign, YouTube said that sketches from late-night shows leading up to the second showdown were among the weekend’s most-viewed. These include Jimmy Fallon’s Donald Trump Calls Madea sketch (3.5 million views) and Saturday Night Live’s Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton Debate Cold Open (15.7 million views).
The third and final presidential debate will take place next Wednesday, Oct. 19 in Las Vegas.
