Election night happened in a lot of small rooms

Last Tuesday I sent you a guide to the independent journalists going live on election night. Then I spent the night flipping between a lot of those streams, and I came away with a picture of how audiences were experiencing election night in America in a very new way.

The midterms drew historic numbers to the polls (about 49% of eligible voters, on track for the second-highest midterm turnout in more than a century, according to early estimates from the University of Florida Election Lab) – but also to smaller channels and streams where specific audiences gathered to watch with their favorite creators and, in most cases, audiences that reflected their own views back at them.

That made for an election night that was less of a single shared experience and, for many watching along with streamers, felt more intimate and engaged than just having CNN on in the background. In fact, it may have been the most distributed election-night audience ever, and we have no real way to count it.

If you were to judge purely by viewer counts, many of the streams come up short. At 9:29 p.m., the All-In stream had about 11,000 people watching. The Projection, Chuck Todd and Chris Cillizza's show with Decision Desk HQ, had 4,100 at 9:24 and 5,000 at 10:36. Tangle had 1,900. None of the rooms I was in got much past 10,000 at any one moment. That's small next to TV, where NBC averaged 6.8 million viewers in primetime, and the six big networks drew about 27 million combined, according to Nielsen.

But the small rooms added up. Streams Charts tracked more than 3,400 channels going live that night across YouTube, Twitch, Rumble and Kick. Together they logged almost 21 million hours watched, four times the 2022 midterms. And that’s not even including the hundreds to thousands who went live on Instagram and TikTok. Most of those channels looked like the ones I was watching: a few thousand people, a fast-moving chat, a host who knows the regulars.

That's where quality beats quantity. Where watching a network or cable channel on election night is a one-to-many experience, streams - even the bigger ones - are hives of interactivity with engaged followers keeping up a fast-paced chat that turns watching into a community experience.

A handful of big rooms took most of the streaming audience; NBC alone accounted for about a fifth of it, though some of the biggest rooms were independent. When Steven Wilson-Beales tallied midterm videos on YouTube in the first 24 hours, live streams took 46% of all views. MeidasTouch, where Scott MacFarlane and Katie Phang anchored, ranked fourth of the 203 channels he tracked, ahead of CBS News. Brian Tyler Cohen got 3 million views from a single stream. (His caveats: these are views, not unique viewers, and the sample is the channels his searches turned up.)

And the small rooms can grow fast. Aidan Hall, an alum of Project C’s Journalism Creators Startup Lab, streamed for eight and a half hours, running every control himself. He peaked at 5,342 concurrent viewers and picked up more than 3,000 new subscribers overnight. 👀

Most streamers don't have their own returns, which means they need the news organizations to do their job, too. (The Projection, built on Decision Desk HQ's own calls, was the exception.) This came up on Friday’s The Grill Room podcast: co-host Julia Alexander watched a lot of the streamers, too, and noted how they were green-screening in results from CNN, The AP or the New York Times’ needle.

The networks still own the big room, and it was fuller this year than in 2022. But for a lot of people it wasn't the only room. The TV was on, and the phone was in their hand with a stream or group text going. Nobody is counting how many people were in both places at once. What creators have built is a lot of smaller rooms, and a lot of them sit right next to the big one.

Thanks to everyone in the Project C community who sent in streams on election night. If you went live and have your own numbers, hit reply. I'd love to see them!

How this newsletter is made: A human (hi, it's Liz 👋) writes, edits and makes every editorial call here. I use Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, as a research tool — each week it sweeps my sources and assembles the first draft of the links roundup. Every link and every word gets a human read before it reaches you.