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President Barack Obama‘s 2015 State of the Union address drew the lowest television viewership for any such speech in the last 15 years, according to new data from Nielsen.The president’s Tuesday address was watched by 31.7 million viewers across 12 broadcast and cable networks that carried the speech live, despite a two-week campaign style tour and a social media blitz to drum up interest.That’s down from the 33.3 million viewers who tuned in to Mr. Obama’s State of the Union address last year, and the 52.4 million who watched him deliver a 2009 speech to a joint session of Congress early on in his presidency.And it’s the second-smallest State of the Union audience since Nielsen started collecting the data in 1993. Only Bill Clinton‘s 2000 speech drew a smaller television audience than Mr. Obama’s this year, with about 31.5 million views.Nielsen’s numbers do not count the online audience, which did not exist in previous years. The White House made an aggressive push this year to promote its own online offering, which contained charts and graphs in addition to a live feed of the speech. All told, the White House reported more than 1.2 million online views of the speech.In addition, a number of websites and media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, offered their own streams of the speech—increasing the total number of viewers well beyond the television audience.
Watching paint dry had it's advantages over watching the State of the Union.
