Trump prevails over Clinton in convention speech ratings race
by Brian Stelter
July 29, 2016: 3:10 PM ET

Trump, by a margin of two million viewers, according to unofficial ratings totals.

Clinton's Thursday night acceptance speech at the DNC averaged 28 million viewers across the six biggest cable and broadcast channels.

Trump's speech at the RNC one week earlier averaged 30 million viewers across the same channels.

For Trump, the victory is even sweeter because while the first three nights of the Democratic convention out-rated the same nights of the Republican convention, his speech spurred more live viewership than Clinton's.

The six channels included here are CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, and CBS.

Nielsen will release a more complete audience estimate for Clinton's speech later in the day on Friday, including Spanish language broadcasters and smaller cable channels.

All in all, 32.2 million people tuned in for Trump last week, according to Nielsen.

The company's data does not incorporate live streaming or web video clips that are viewed later.

A live stream of Clinton's speech had more than 200,000 simultaneous viewers on YouTube Thursday night.

But the vast majority of convention viewing still happens the traditional way -- live, on TV sets, through channels like CNN and NBC.

CNN was by far the highest-rated channel on Thursday, averaging 7.5 million viewers during Clinton's speech. MSNBC was #2 with 5.3 million viewers. NBC was #3 with 4.5 million.

While Trump's speech was slightly higher-rated on TV, the results were reversed on Facebook, which measured the volume of conversation about each convention.

Facebook said the final day of the DNC generated "46.5 million likes, posts, comments and shares" from 12.6 million American users, slightly ahead of the final day of the RNC, when the site had 45.1 million interactions from 12.2 million users.

Trump, a former reality TV star, is a student of both social media and TV ratings; he frequently comments on his attention-grabbing abilities.

But the Democrats' gathering in Philadelphia turned out to be higher-rated than the Republican convention in Cleveland through Wednesday.

Monday night's DNC speeches were seen by 26 million viewers across seven channels, versus 23 million for night one of the RNC.

Tuesday night's DNC coverage averaged 24 million, versus 19 million for night two of the RNC.

And Wednesday night attracted 24.4 million viewers, versus 23.4 million viewers for the RNC.

Final numbers for Thursday will be available later in the day on Friday.

http://money.cnn.com/2016/07/29/medi...-four-ratings/