Donald Trump Still Driving Most News Views Pre-Election
Election Day is nearly here, and in the lead-up, news publishers have leaned in to meet audience interest.
Data from Tubular Labs shows that in October 2024, news & politics media creators in the U.S. generated 2.6 billion views on YouTube alone. Top topics included Donald Trump (870 million views), Prince Harry (685 million), Kamala Harris (630 million) and Joe Biden (276 million) — showing that while the once-vaunted “Trump Bump” may have subsided, the former president still maintains a significant presence in the news.
From a publishing strategy standpoint, the most news views in October came from videos that were 5-to-10 minutes in length (549 million views). Videos that ran 20 or more minutes were No. 2 at 512 million, showcasing that while shorts have their place on YouTube, there’s still an enormous audience for long-form video. Especially when it comes to news. Videos uploaded from 2-2:59 p.m. ET generated the most views on the month, at 176 billion. That’s slightly more than those uploaded from 6-6:59, which had 174 million.
But which publishers were generating the largest share of these October news & politics views? Tubular shows that MSNBC scored 269 million views to top all U.S. news media publishers. Fox News was No. 2 at 269 million, followed by CNN (158 million), NBC News (118 million) and Megyn Kelly (114 million).
Notably, while the top four creators were all TV networks (benefiting from having an existing and large library of video content to quickly repost), three of the top 10 — Kelly, David Pakman, The Rubin Report — are individuals. Well-known individuals, of course. But all three conceivably have an uphill battle to build audiences, yet have been able to do so just the same during a busy news cycle.
The full list of top 10 publishers is included below.
YouTube’s Top U.S. News & Politics Media Creators – Oct. 2024
MSNBC (269 million views)
Fox News (259 million)
CNN (158 million)
NBC News (118 million)
Megyn Kelly (114 million)
The Daily Show (108 million)
ABC News (104 million)
LiveNOW From Fox (94.9 million)
David Pakman (61.8 million)
The Rubin Report (58.1 million)
Trump lead extended into the written word as well, as Chartbeat recently dove into.
Chartbeat found that 2 million people read 10 or more articles about Trump in October, which was four times the amount that read 10 or more articles about Harris. And one major reason for that is because of how the two are covered: The pool of articles centering Trump is twice as large as those centering Harris; while 90.9K articles featured Trump, 44.5K featured Harris.
Of people reading 10 or more articles about Kamala Harris, 64% are also reading articles about Israel. For Trump readers, it’s just 46%. However, for the term “Gaza war,” Trump readers are twice as likely to read these articles as Harris readers.
Trump readers are 1.4 times more likely to read about the economy than Harris readers. And while both reader groups are reading about immigration, behaviors differ ther as well. Harris readers are 2.2x more likely to read articles with the key term “illegal immigrant” and 4.7x more likely to read articles about “border policy.” “Illegal immigration” is the top immigration-related term overall.
In the past month, 20% of Harris readers have also read about “election fraud” and 17% have read about “election integrity. That makes the group 2.5x more likely to read about these terms vs. Trump readers.
Whether readers consume more news about Trump or Harris, though, they’re still likely to intermingle. The study found that 95% of Harris readers are reading about Trump, and 95% of Trump readers are reading about Harris.
