Variety - Republican National Convention Night 1 Down on DNC in Early Numbers
The first night of the Republican National Convention was down a touch in total viewership on the first night of the Democratic National Convention, at least according to early numbers.
Across the three broadcast networks, the RNC night 1 drew around 4.9 million total viewers, a 14% drop from last Monday’s DNC first night which drew 5.7 million.
TheHill.com First night of GOP convention delivers nearly six times more views than start of Democrats' event on C-SPAN livestream
C-SPAN's livestream of the first night of the Republican National Convention has attracted nearly 440,000 views, marking a substantial increase over the start of the Democratic National Convention, which drew 76,000 views.
They spin the numbers by pointing to views on C-SPAN. Now, I’m more than a little suspicious. It’s not difficult to fake this. But let’s suppose it’s legitimate. That would be an Republican advantage on C-SPAN of about 364,000. (They don’t say how close to 440,000 they were) That’s more than made up by the 800,000 Democratic advantage on broadcast TV.
The article hypes up the C-SPAN numbers, but that’s an odd metric. It mentions the 18.7 million people who watched the first night of the DNC, but spends a lot of time pointing out that it’s less than the 2016 numbers, and less than Trump got 4 years ago.
What they don’t mention is that Trump’s numbers are expected to be lower than 2016 as well. They ignore that Trump’s numbers for the opening night on broadcast stations were lower than Biden’s opening night on broadcast stations. We’ll know more when we get cable numbers. It does seem clear that Trump is desperate for ratings, and will hype up anything he can get.
Trump has already had the roll call and acceptance speech, so I don’t know if viewership is going to build. Perhaps Trump wanted to get maximal ratings right away.