• by Wayne Friedman , August 22, 2020

On the final night of its four-night event, the Democratic National Convention witnessed another uptick in TV viewing of 8% to 24.6 million viewers versus the previous night.

Twelve networks aired the 90-minute (10:00 p.m. ET to 11:30 p.m. ET) virtual TV show, where Joe Biden accepted the Democratic nomination to run as its party’s presidential candidate.

This was down 17% from the same night four years ago, when Hillary Clinton accepted the Democratic nomination to run for President.

For this year’s entire four-day event, MSNBC was the top network with a Nielsen-measured 4.8 million, looking at its average-minute-live program-plus-same day viewing metric, followed by CNN with 4.1 million, Fox News Channel at 3.5 million; ABC News with 2.6 million; and CBS News at 2.0 million.

MSNBC says this was its most-viewed week in prime time since its launch in 1996.

Vizio’s Inscape data division -- which surveys 15 million smart TV U.S. households -- shows other data.

Of those TV sets tuned to the DNC, CNN had a 12.2% “share” of audience, while NBC came in at 11%, followed by MSNBC with 9.2%; Fox News Channel, 8%; CBS, 8%; and C-SPAN, 2.5%. Vizio says 24% of all U.S. TV sets were tuned to the DNC prime-time show.

Looking at paid TV advertising running around the entire event, Rocket Mortgage: "Rocket Can: Queen" led with 27.5 million impressions, according to iSpot.tv. After this came Uber’s "Wear a Mask. Protect Each Other" (25.8 million); Rocket Mortgage: "Rocket Can: Together" (25.8 million); Searchlight Pictures: "The Personal History of David Copperfield" (24.7 million); and Safelite Auto Glass: "Auto Glass Damage" (23.7 million)

Also of note was the 24.7 million impressions WarnerMedia’s HBO/HBO Max got via non-paid TV promos for “Lovecraft Country,” with much of it running on WarnerMedia linear ad-supported TV networks: CNN and TNT.

The DNC averaged 21.6 million viewers over the four nights, which was down 18% from 26.2 million viewers in 2016.