Former FBI Director James Comey's Senate testimony on Thursday attracted more than 100 million viewers as he detailed conversations with President Donald Trump and discussed the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The hearing was seen by 89 million people on Facebook and approximately 19.5 million people saw it on television, according to Axios:
The high-profile Congressional hearing (McCarthy, Iran-Contra, Anita-Hill) used to be prime spots for television. Now those audiences are shifting online. In addition to Facebook, 2.7 million people watched it on Twitter's Bloomberg co-branded livestream. (One caveat: a Facebook view can be as short as 3 seconds, so a direct comparison to TV ratings is inexact.)
The TV viewership was less than some historic television hearings: 85% of American TV households tuned in to the Watergate hearings and 55 million people watched the Iran-contra hearings over the course of a week
Chartbeat, a data analytics firm, said that more than 900,000 people read articles related to Comey across the internet at any 5-minute interval between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. Through their analysis, they also discovered that the amount of time that people were on the web pages spiked by 20 percent during the hearing, due to people likely keeping their live stream open in browser, according to Axios:
On TV, the majority of 19.5 million viewers, according to Nielsen, were age 55+, but on Twitter, the majority (88%) of logged-in live viewers under the age of 35.
Twitter estimates 3.6 million Tweets were sent from 7a.m.-1:30pm Thursday discussing Comey's testimony, which is small in comparison to the 27 million+ tweets sent during the Super Bowl this year. Facebook says there were 8 million comments, reactions, and shares on its platform in relation to the hearing on Thursday.