Rumble wasn’t the only digital platform to see a major spike in viewership on Election Day. YouTube generated 72 million hours of watch time with Voting Day coverage–and, like on cable TV, Fox News was one of the most-watched entities offering real-time reporting of ballot results.
According to data from Streams Charts, YouTube generated more Election Day watch time than any other platform: It alone grabbed over 80% of livestream viewership across the web. Right-leaning Rumble came in second place with 13.1% of viewership (around 11 million hours), followed by Twitch with around ~4 million hours. Kick got just 1.6% of viewership, around 1.3 million views.
Streams Charts says peak viewership for Election Day coverage hit 9.14 million viewers across platforms (which is impressive for Hasan Piker in particular, since he mentioned on Twitter that he ended up with 7.5 million total live viewers over the course of the night). Average concurrent viewership for political coverage throughout the day was around 3.5 million, with that figure of course spiking the closer we got to the announcement of results in key swing states like Pennsylvania and Michigan.
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YouTube is traditional TV’s top competitor these days (perhaps to Netflix‘s chagrin), and in some ways, they’re beginning to mirror each other–like how Fox News was the most-watched source of Election Day coverage on both YouTube and cable TV.
Streams Charts’ data shows Fox News was YouTube’s single most popular live broadcaster during Election Day. It peaked at 1.14 million concurrent viewers–its channel’s highest number to date. It beat the next most popular broadcaster, NBC News, by almost double, as NBC topped out at 616.9K viewers. Streams Charts notes this was a flip from the Trump v Harris debate in September, where NBC’s coverage drew more viewers than Fox News’s.
It’s also worth noting that “all the top broadcasts were on YouTube, as this platform remains the primary choice for TV networks to stream their content online,” Streams Charts commented.
Over on cable TV, Nielsen ratings showed that 42 million people tuned in for Election Day broadcasts, and a solid 9.8 million of them watched on Fox News. Next most-watched was ABC with 5.7 million viewers, then MSNBC with 5.5 million, NBC with 5.3 million, and CNN with 4.7 million.
While we can’t compare watch hours to individual viewers and see an apples-to-apples comparison between traffic on YouTube versus cable TV, it is clear that conservative coverage was popular with viewers both on and off the internet.
It’s also clear that YouTube remains the most prominent livestream viewership destination for people interested in political news–and that could prove to be a problem, if YouTube continues allowing people to spread election misinformation on its platform. Although, considering Trump looks to have won both the Electoral College and popular vote, there haven’t been many cries of election rigging from the right this time around.
But still, for future elections, YouTube may want to consider what President Joe Biden told content creators at the White House back in August: “I’ve been around a long time, and it’s never been this bad before. It’s getting incredibly difficult to count the number of lies people hear. They don’t know what to believe, they don’t know what to count on. But you break through in ways that I think are going to change the entire dynamic of the way in which we communicate.”
