Watching political satire on U.S. election night

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Thanks to Bill Brioux's tweet on the ratings of The Daily Show & Colbert Report on U.S. election night, this table was possible:

Show	Network	Viewership	Time (EST)	Live
The Daily Show	Comedy	269,000	11:00 PM	Yes
The Daily Show	CTV	374,000	12:05 AM	No
The Daily Show	Total	643,000
Colbert Report	Comedy	226,000	11:30 PM	Yes
Colbert Report	CTV	170,000	12:36 AM	No
Colbert Report	Total	396,000

Last night, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert presented their shows live on Comedy Central in the States and on the Comedy Network in Canada. It would be nice to see how these numbers compare to non-election figures, but I had no luck in finding them (nor do I have access to them.)

One thing that stood out is Colbert's audience (170,000) is less than half of Stewart's (374,000) on the same network, CTV. Without any previous data to compare, it's difficult to say why this is the case. One possible reason for this is some viewers may have switched from the fake news to the real news as they waited for Romney to concede, which he did at 12:55 a.m. with 12 minutes left in Colbert's show.



Speaking about political satire, new episodes of CBC's Rick Mercer Report and 22 Minutes happened to perfectly fall on election night. And Bill tweeted those numbers too. Let's compare these to the audience figures of their season premieres, which both aired on September 18:

	Season Premiere	U.S. Election Night
Mercer Report	1,256,000	1,017,000
22 Minutes	1,009,000	718,000

Mercer and 22 Minutes aired during the first hour of the election coverage on U.S. networks, but Mercer still managed to pull in over a million viewers. This Hour has 22 Minutes' audience level seems to be nothing out of the ordinary, a number that could reflect any given night.