38 Million View Obama’s Speech; Highest-Rated Convention In History

This is simply astonishing and might have something to do with why John McCain made such a rash knee jerk choice for his VP.

An astonishing 38 million people watched Barack Obama's speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination, a record number for any convention audience.

Mr. Obama’s speech — a historic one given his status as the first African American nominee of a major political party — reached significantly more viewers than the comparable addresses in 2004. Coverage of John Kerry’s acceptance speech in 2004 had 24.4 million viewers; coverage of George W. Bush’s convention speech that same year drew 27.5 million.

The audience estimate of 38.3 million means that Mr. Obama’s speech reached more viewers than the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing, the final “American Idol” or the Academy Awards this year, the Associated Press notes.

Furthermore, the four-night Democratic convention ranks as the most-watched convention of either party, Democratic or Republican, since Nielsen began measuring conventions in 1960.

It'll be very interesting to see what kind of figures McCain attracts next week. There are reports that he is finding it hard to fill a 10,000 seat convention as opposed to Obama who was said to have easily attracted 85,000 according to some reports.

I don't expect McCain to attract anything like that many viewers, although his gun toting, former beauty queen, VP is bound to attract the gigglers.

And there's every chance that Obama's audience is even larger than the figure being given:

Comparisons to previous conventions must include a number of important caveats. For one thing, until the 1980s conventions were shown on just three networks, and they were covered in greater length than they are now. This year’s conventions are being shown on at least ten TV channels. Additionally, consumers have the option to record the convention and play it back later using a digital video recorder, and those viewers won’t be counted for weeks. Perhaps most significantly, this convention is being streamed online on a number of different Web sites, and the Internet audience will be hard, if not impossible, to measure.

I certainly know that most people here in the UK, where it was not shown, have had to watch it through the Democratic Convention website, and I'm not sure those figures will ever be known.

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Tags: Barack Obama, US election, John McCain, convention, viewing figures