The closing night of the Republican National Convention drew the gathering’s biggest TV audience of the week, one larger than the closing night of the RNC four years ago. It wasn’t quite large enough, however, to push the convention as a whole past 2020’s numbers.
Thursday’s coverage of the convention, running from 10 p.m. to about 12:15 a.m. ET, averaged 25.38 million viewers across 14 outlets, according to Nielsen figures. Most of that time was devoted to Donald Trump’s speech accepting the party’s nomination for president for the third consecutive election.
Nielsen says the audience peaked between 10:45 and 11 p.m. ET, early in the speech, with 28.4 million viewers.
For the four nights of the RNC, multi-network coverage averaged 19.07 million viewers, a shade under the 19.39 million average for the 2020 convention. Monday, Wednesday and Thursday’s audiences were all up slightly from four years ago, but a big decline on Tuesday — which, at 14.81 million viewers, was down by 24 percent from 2020 — dragged down the overall average. (Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game also aired Tuesday and may have siphoned off some viewers.)
More to come.
