Comey Testimony Was Ratings Winner

(Reuters photo)

In a rare move, the major networks upended their daytime schedules Thursday to air live coverage of former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, and it paid off.

ABC, CBS and NBC—along with the three big cable news networks—pulled overnight ratings of 14.3 for the Comey testimony, which began about 10 a.m. EST and ran for about three hours.

While broadcast ratings got a boost from the high-profile testimony, Facebook Live streams of the event also drew big numbers. According to a chart by Delmondo, a social video analytics firm, BBC led the way on the platform by attracting 793,865 total views.

FierceCable reports Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Facebook Live stream of the event drew a bigger audience (660,180) than The New York Times (615,630) and Fox News (525,164). Also surprising, Super Deluxe’s psychedelic remix stream on Facebook chalked up 483,000 views, more than the Washington Post (474,661) and ABC News (347,967).

For the networks, the rare daytime ratings blockbuster came after a 2016-2017 season in which both NBC and CBS notched significant ratings wins.

For NBC, it’s a first-place finish in the 18-49 demographic for the third time in the past four years. The broadcaster finished the season with a 2.1 Nielsen live program/same-day time-shifted rating, mostly on pace with what it posted last year, according to MediaPost.

While CBS may have trailed in that demographic, the broadcaster won out in terms of total viewers, with 9.6 million. NBC had 8.1 million, ABC had 6.2 million, Fox had 5.8 million and the CW had 1.8 million.

In the 25-54 age bracket, NBC led broadcast nets with 859K viewers, followed by ABC’s 854K and CBS’s 784K.

But CNN clocked 1.017M news-demo viewers, putting it well ahead of comopetitors. MSNBC logged 633K news demo viewers and FNC scored 600K.