The One In Which I State an Opinion on: CNN/YouTube Debate Viewership

CNN and YouTube have teamed up for a pair of presidential debates, one for the Republican candidates running in the primaries, the other for the Democrats. The Democratic Debate was held the other night and was watched by 2,552,000 total viewers. 831,000 were in the 25-54 demo, 663,000 in the 18-49 demo, 407,000 in the 18-34 demo. Still with me?

Subtract the "key" demo there, the 18-34's, and you've still got 2,144,593 people who are 35+ years of age who watched the debates. That's still a huge slice of the pie.

On YouTube, the video "Evolution of Dance" has 53,489,655 views. The "Quick Change" "artists" from America's Got Talent had 18,893,597 views. Even "Dramatic Chipmunk" has over two million views.

The umpteenth repeat of High School Musical this past Sunday attracted 5.79 pairs of eyeballs.

CNN.com's Live Player served up 237,315 video streams of the debate on Monday. Let's assume they are 18-34. That's still 644,315 young viewers. Paula Zahn was fired from/left CNN because of low numbers which still exceeded that in TOTAL viewership.

Having YouTuber's ask pompous questions instead of reporters is a nice gimmick. But it would seem that, in the grand scheme of things, YouTubers and the "key demo" just don't care. Total viewship was slightly down from the last debate. And advertisers know that the money is actually made on the older people who watch cable news, not the young people who do lots of other stuff instead.

If the idea was just to increase awareness about YouTube, then the debate probably worked. If the idea was to engage young people and get them to turn out and really care, it looks like it probably failed. Maybe if the debate was 10 minutes or shorter?