The 2024 US presidential election was one of the biggest events of the year and was reflected in record-breaking livestream viewership across all platforms on election day.

What happened: Streams Charts reported that live streams about the election generated nearly 84 million hours of watch time — nearly five times the viewership for the vice presidential debates in September Kamala Harris and elected president Donald Trump.

The dominant platform for election coverage was Owned by Alphabet Inc GOOGL GOOG YouTube, which accounted for over 80% of the total watch time for all shows. Rumble Inc. RUM took second place with 13.1% of viewers.

The peak viewership for political streams on Election Day reached over 9.14 million viewers, with the average viewership reaching nearly 3.5 million. Towards the end of voting and the announcement of the results, audience engagement skyrocketed.

While the debates only lasted a few hours, some Election Day broadcasts ran uninterrupted from the start of voting until the results were announced.

The most watched program was Owned by Fox Corp FOX FOXA Fox News on YouTube, which peaked at over 1.14 million viewers – a historic record for the channel. Comcast Corp. CMCSA subsidiary NBC News took second place with nearly 616,900 peak viewers.

See also: Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion and now has $50 billion in revenue in just one year

Why it matters: All of the top shows took place on YouTube, as the platform remains the first choice for TV networks to stream their content online.

Among individual streamers, commentators Dan Bongino And Steven Crowder “on Rumble” drew the most viewers and set both new personal viewership records.

Streamer Hasan AbiTo Owned by Amazon.com Inc AMZN Twitchalso marked an all-time high of approximately 313,400 concurrent viewers for its Election Day coverage.

Throughout the campaign, Trump consistently outperformed Harris in mentions on Twitch, maintaining a share of around 70%, compared to Harris' 30%. That trend continued on Election Day, with Trump's mentions rising to 104,000 while Harris' mentions rose to 41.6,000.

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Disclaimer: This content was created in part using AI tools, and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.