YouTube hails ‘record breaking’ presidential debate stream

This week’s US presidential candidate debate between Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump marked one of the biggest live streams in YouTube history, according to the service.

The debate notched up nearly 2 million live concurrent viewers and 3 million live watch hours across the six news organisations that streamed the debate on YouTube, according to stats published by the video site.

“To put these numbers into context, we took a look at 2012 debate viewership on YouTube. Compared to 2012, last night’s debate had 14 times larger live viewership, five times higher watch time, and four times more peak concurrent viewers. And views on all debate-related videos exceeded 88 million,” said Kurt Wilms, product lead, live streaming at YouTube, in a blog post published yesterday.

Outside of the US, YouTube said that the top five countries where people tuned into the debate were Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Australia and New Zealand.