The nearly 6 million viewers [of the Harris interview] is CNN’s best performance in the 9 p.m. ET hour since more than 9.5 million people tuned in for the June 27 debate between President Joe Biden and Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Internet numbers are wildly contested today, especially when the claim is made by a widely-detested figure like Elon Musk and the contest is coming from an outlet that is outright hostile to him. These figures are therefore not as reliable.
Later on in the interview, Trump appeared to be looking at the views on his post that shared the Space, which was at around 60 million views at the time. Post views on X function more like impressions, tracking each instance a post appears in front of a user, whether they actively clicked on it — or it just appeared on their feed as they scrolled.
The live audio Space itself between Trump and Musk peaked at around 1.4 million concurrent viewers.
Musk has leaned into Trump's inaccurate viewership references though.
"Combined views of the conversation with @realDonaldTrump and subsequent discussion by other accounts now ~1 billion," Musk said on X, calculating the total of all post views or impressions about the Space chat.
As of publishing time, the X Space between Trump and Musk has roughly 24 million views, which includes the live viewership numbers as well as replays. The post itself, however, claims 183 million views or impressions.
That's a pretty big delta, between a billion and 24 million.
I notice, however, that even the lowest figure is four times the Nielsen figure.
Does it matter? Who knows. The thing about the internet is people from everywhere could be watching it (making "a billion" more plausible than it would be if limited to the USA, while Nielsen numbers are localized to America). Most of those people don't vote; and anyway, just having an interest in what they have to say doesn't mean you're going to vote for them. I'd guess that most supporters of either candidate are planning to vote for them without regard to what they might say.
Still, it's interesting to see how much more attention there is for the one candidate than the other.
4 comments:
I think the best assumption to make is simply that all these numbers are being gamed.
The YouTube posting of the first (of three) portion of the CNN Harris-Walz interview has 1.7 million views as of 7am ET 31 August. Splitting the posting increases CNN's ad revenue as well as potentially tripling the number of views that can be claimed, though both parts 2 and 3 have less than a million views each as of the same time. Of course all the caveats in your post and the referenced article apply the CNN posting on YouTube as well as Trump's interview with Musk on X.
My impression right now is that this race is in some ways similar to the W-Gore contest in 2000. After an initial flurry of enthusiasm for Gore, his support started to fade though there was little corresponding upswing in W's numbers. Trump's support is likely solid but it remains to be seen if Harris can sustain Democrat enthusiasm. My impression of the interview reaction is that she'll have a tough time doing it. She seems to be planning on just a few high stakes presentations rather than a steady stream of widely publicized campaign events. The wild card, of course, is how much election shenanigans the Democrats can get to influence the outcome.
To some degree it's their own fault that she's not drawing as much attention: she was nobody's choice. She doesn't have a real constituency of her own that actually believes in her. We know that because she had to drop out of the 2020 race because she couldn't even come close to winning in the California primary, where she was the 'favorite daughter.'
The fact that they refused to have a primary to replace Biden, and forced him through the process regardless of his unfitness, damaged the idea of popular legitimacy on that side. The sudden deposing of Biden and his replacement by her, without any democratic process at all, further damaged it. She had no real constituency to begin with either.
So at this point the only real question in the election is, "Which team do you want to be in charge?" Trump can say he's broadly ok with abortion rights at the state level and promise universal 'free' IVF; she can declare that none of her old policies are still operative, without actually declaring any new ones but affirming she has 'the same values.' None of it will change anything.
We end up just down to how large the committed coalitions are, plus how much they can cheat. On the latter side, the establishment has all the advantages.
https://elizabethnickson.substack.com/p/the-2024-cheat-and-whats-being-done
Yes, well......the election depends almost entirely on enthuisiasm (on the D side). She won't get a lot from the traditional sources, blacks and Hispanics--which means that they will need a MASSIVE cheat.
RFK jr introduced the term "apparatus" discussing the support the traditional party-line voters offer each candidate, irrespective of the actual personality or claimed policies of those condidates.
Beats the term "swamp".
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