Wednesday’s Audience Again Increases Big Over 2004’s

Wednesday’s third night of the Democratic National Convention again brought the cable news operations significant audience increases across the board over the same night in the 2004 convention with prime-time audiences up between 61% and 96% over 2004.

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Casual news viewers flocked to CNN as they again won the prime-time battle with an average of 4.24 million viewers and 1.749 million adults 25-54.

CNN immediately got into a squabbling match with NBC because for the 10-11pm hour CNN had 5.383 million viewers to NBC’s 5.361 million. Hour win for CNN. But the telecast ran to 11:03pm and if you take their entire 63 minute broadcast into account NBC averaged 5.464 million to CNN’s 5.375 million. Program win for NBC. Honestly, it’s a bit silly.

Fox News was second in prime-time viewership averaging 2.855 million, and  MSNBC was second in adults 25-54 with an average of 873,000.

Here’s even more detailed aggregate data with lots of age demographic information directly from Nielsen if you’re interested.