U.S. second presidential debate sees number of social media viewers soar while TV audience decline

U.S. social media giants like YouTube and Twitter garnered skyrocketing viewership and tweet writers of the second presidential debate while TV audience of the debate went down by one-fifth from the first, it was reported Tuesday.

The Sunday night's debate between Republican Donald Trump and his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton only attracted 63 million TV viewers but garnered 124 million viewers from all over the world on YouTube, up 40 percent from the first.

The YouTube said during the second debate, viewers tuned into its livestream for an average of 25 minutes. Altogether, they watched 2.5 million hours of the livestream, nearly six times higher than in 2012. Highest viewership was seen in Canada, Mexico, Australia, Great Britain and Vietnam.

Meanwhile, another 3.2 million tuned into Twitter's livestream, and Facebook's Live broadcast partnership with ABC News now has 7.4 million views, according to a New York Times report.

The debate also broke a Twitter record with more than 17 million related tweets sent Sunday night, with Trump talk dominating the conversation. Sixty-four percent of the tweets focused on the New York billionaire while Clinton added 25,000 followers to Trump's 16,000 during the debate.

Facebook also enjoyed its most-talked-about debate to date, as 19.8 million U.S. users generated more than 92.4 million related likes, posts, comments and shares.

People now watch the debate in 30-second soundbites, memes, gifs, and YouTube videos edited to make it look like Trump and Clinton are singing a duet, said the local media.

The first presidential Debate won 84 million total viewers, breaking record set by Jimmy Carter vs. Ronald Reagan in 1980. Enditem