Seven million watch the ITV Leaders Debate

A peak audience of 7.4 million (a 33% share of viewing) tuned in to watch The ITV Leaders' Debate between the seven party leaders Natalie Bennett, Nick Clegg, Nigel Farage, Ed Miliband, Leanne Wood, Nicola Sturgeon and David Cameron.

Moderated by ITV News at Ten's Julie Etchingham, the two-hour debate between the leaders of the seven parties averaged 7 million viewers (a 31% share of viewing), making it the most watched programme of the night.

The audience to The ITV Leaders' Debate makes it ITV's most watched programme of the year, outside of the ITV soaps (Coronation Street and Emmerdale) and Broadchurch, and last night was ITV s most watched Thursday evening since England v Uruguay in the 2014 World Cup.

The ITV Leaders' Debate was a big event on social channels, generating over 1.5 million tweets, making it the second most tweeted about TV programme of the year so far in 2015, behind only The Brits Awards. Tweets per minute hit an average rate of 8,657 and The ITV Leaders' Debate accounted for 96.3% of TV related tweets on the night.

The hashtag #Leadersdebate trended on twitter in the UK throughout the day, and while the programme was on air, it became the top trending topic Worldwide.

Access to the debate was unrestricted, and there were 226,000 long form views of the live streaming of the debate on ITV Player and the ITV News YouTube Channel alone.

LINK:	http://www.itv.com/presscentre/press-releases/seven-million-watch-itv-...
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