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The Democratic National Convention continues to struggle for eyeballs on television, according to data from Nielsen, which suggests that Night 2 of the event attracted just 6.6 million viewers at ABC, CBS and NBC.
The audience sunk 44 percent across the three broadcast networks compared to the second night of 2016's convention that nominated Hillary Clinton for president.
The convention that will nominate Joe Biden for president kicked off Monday and attracted 5.8 million viewers at the three broadcast networks that night, which was off 50 percent from 2016's first night.
The second night's slate of high profile speakers included Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jill Biden and Cindy McCain, among others.
Across cable networks Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, 11.9 million people tuned into the second night of the convention, down a more respectable 9 percent from four years ago. The total audience for the six major broadcast and cable channels, therefore, was 18.5 million, 26 percent lower than four years earlier.
The Nielsen results indicate that Americans are not tuning in to this year's "virtual" convention to the degree they tuned into live ones in year's past.
The virtual nature of the convention this year is owed to the coronavirus pandemic, and the Biden-Kamala Harris ticket is hoping that what their show loses in audience participation on television it will make up for online, where younger Americans typically find their news and entertainment. The DNC claimed, for example, that 10.2 million people streamed at least some of Monday's event online (NBC saw 1.6 million "video starts" of its Monday night live stream at its YouTube Channel, more than any other broadcaster).
At the official YouTube Channel for the Democratic National Convention, the two-and-a-half hour stream of the entire night on Tuesday had been viewed 345,000 times in the first 13 hours of its availability.
The DNC also posts short highlights at its YouTube Channel, though numbers show they aren't viewed much. Tuesday night's remarks by Jill Biden, potentially the next first lady, were watched just 2,400 times in 13 hours while a Monday speech by former first lady Michelle Obama was viewed only 3,600 times since then.
This story has been updated to reflect the latest Nielsen data for both broadcast and cable television.
About the writer
Paul Bond has been a journalist for three decades. Prior to joining Newsweek he was with The Hollywood Reporter. He ... Read more