If Election Day is the political world’s equivalent of the Super Bowl, then NBC News’ digital platforms scored a touchdown to kick off the month. NBCNews.com and NBC News Now saw their two highest days on record on Nov. 5 and Nov. 6, and also dominated the social space among the big three broadcasters.
“It reflects a lot of what we’ve been working on throughout the past year,” Catherine Kim, NBC News’ executive vice president of editorial, tells TVNewser about her staff’s game plan. “We leaned into live results, live information, and live streaming and leveraged the full operation of NBC News across big events like Election Day.”
That preparation resulted in more than 100 million video views for NBC News Now—the streamer’s largest audience to date. Meanwhile, NBCNews.com saw over 30 million unique visitors, with the constantly refreshing live results pages driving up page views to the realm of 120 million, well beyond what it achieved in 2020. Additionally, the Election Day live blog now holds the record as the most-viewed article in the site’s history.
Kim also made an early bet on TikTok as a news-hungry social media platform, and that marker paid off on Election Night. The network estimates that it received 127 million views on TikTok on Nov. 5, and another 110 million views the following day when President-elect Donald Trump clinched his victory over Vice President Kamala Harris. Those numbers handily surpassed broadcast rivals ABC News and CBS News on the platform.
It should be noted that in comparison to its digital growth, NBC’s linear election coverage saw modest declines since the previous presidential election cycle, yet another indication of where audiences are migrating to get their news. And the larger linear to digital shift is something that all three broadcast networks will be navigating in earnest over the next few years. (We spoke with Kim prior to the news that Comcast would be spinning off many of its cable outlets—including MSNBC and CNBC—into a separate company in 2025.)
As social-friendly streaming spectacles like Netflix’s Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson bout have shown, those audiences are increasingly captivated by live events. Kim says that NBC’s emphasis on delivering live results via its TikTok feed kept younger viewers engaged—a marked change from 2020 when that audience wasn’t as tuned into the minute-by-minute horse race.
