How DeSantis’s Twitter Spaces Event Compares to Past Livestreams
Consider that a 2016 Facebook Live event, featuring two BuzzFeed employees placing rubber bands around a watermelon until it exploded, drew more than 800,000 concurrent viewers and a total of five million views within hours of its conclusion. The 2017 livestream of a pregnant giraffe on YouTube brought in five million viewers a day.
The event with Mr. DeSantis was even dwarfed by past audio livestreams on Twitter. Last month, more than three million people at one point concurrently listened to an interview of Elon Musk, Twitter’s owner, by a BBC reporter in a Twitter Space, according to the company’s numbers. A recording of that Space said 2.6 million listeners ultimately “tuned in.” (Twitter did not explain the discrepancy between the concurrent listener count and the “tuned in” figure.)
“Getting a few hundred thousand people to do something for some number of minutes is not that big of a deal,” said Brian Wieser, a longtime media analyst who runs the Madison and Wall strategic advisory firm. “I’m not quite sure that using Twitter to announce a presidential campaign was the most impactful environment, though maybe Twitter could become that.”
Determining the reach and audience for Mr. DeSantis’s announcement on Twitter is significant because the online event had been heralded as a modern way of making political proclamations, bypassing traditional media such as cable news and network television. Yet the initial numbers from Twitter raise questions about whether any presidential candidate can ignore traditional media for their big campaign announcements.
Although television does not generally pull in the same numbers that it did a decade ago, some political events that are broadcast live still garner large audiences. When President Biden delivered his State of the Union address on Feb. 7, for instance, the speech was aired live to 27.3 million people watching on 16 TV networks, according to Nielsen.
Source: The New York Times
