Just How Much Did Election Coverage Dominate TV Viewership?
Welcome to our weekly snapshot of TV by the numbers, highlighting the most-watched shows and networks for November 4-10, with insights from Inscape, the currency-grade smart TV ACR data provider and data technology division of Vizio. Data is linear, live TV only and includes all episode types (new and reruns). Rankings are by percent share duration (i.e., time spent watching).
It was a busy news week, to say the least — and there’s nothing like a major election to get people tuning into live, linear TV. Below, some viewership insights around the week as a whole, plus a few highlights for primetime on Nov. 5 as the election unfolded.
Across the entire week:
Combined, top election-specific broadcasts (including those that aired before, during and after Election Day itself on Nov. 5) captured over 8% of all minutes watched from Nov. 4-10.
Watch-time was slightly up week-over-week for football: NFL games scored a 6.42% viewership share (up from 6.29% the previous week), while college football had a 5.11% viewership share (up from 4.96%).
Outside of its specifically-titled election broadcasts (but undoubtedly fueled by commentary and coverage around the election), two Fox News programs are week-over-week ranking newcomers: Your World With Neil Cavuto (No. 20) and The Story With Martha MacCallum (No. 24).
Yellowstone rockets up the ranking from No. 33 previously to No. 7, with a 1.00% viewership share across the entire week. The show has been on hiatus since January 2023 (although reruns have aired frequently), and part two of the fifth and final season finally arrived on Nov. 10. Several cable networks including Paramount Network, CMTV and POP aired reruns over the weekend leading up to Sunday’s premiere.
Looking at primetime only on Election Night:
Election-specific programming racked up over 66% of watch-time, led by Fox News’ Democracy 2024 Election Coverage, which had a nearly 17% primetime viewership share.
NBC’s Election Night: Decision 2024 was No. 2 for primetime viewership share (12.26%), followed by CNN’s Election Night in America (8.91%).
The top Spanish-language election broadcast was Univision’s Noche de elecciones (2.21%)
Although news/election coverage dominated for watch-time, some viewers sought out counter programming. College football was the most popular alternative (1.38% of primetime minutes), followed by reruns of The Big Bang Theory on TBS (1.30%) and Chicago Fire on ION (1.18%), and Hallmark’s original Christmas movie Pride, Prejudice, and Mistletoe (0.75%).
On the network side of things, Fox News was the overwhelming winner for the week — get the details on The Measure.
