The second Republican presidential debate has easily set a ratings record at CNN, attracting and average of 22.9 million viewers over the three-hour event.
Thursday night's debate, hosted by CNN at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, featured plenty of sparring among the 11 candidates, although less with the moderators than the first one, hosted by Fox News on August 6.
The fireworks and plenty of buzz weren't quite enough to top the ratings from that first debate, which scored 24 million viewers.
[seealso slug=http://sale-online.click/2015/09/16/politicians-vs-media%5D%3C/p%3E%3Cp%3EStill, CNN's ratings are huge, easily beating its previous most-watched program -- a 1993 episode of Larry King Live in which Al Gore and Ross Perot debated the NAFTA trade bill.
It also easily beat CNN's previous most-watched debate, which was held in California in 2008 and averaged 8.3 million viewers.
The ratings from Wednesday are also particularly strong considering the length of the debate, which affect how ratings are calculated.
CNN also announced that its live stream -- which the network made available for free online -- peaked at 921,000 simultaneous users and attracted a total of 4.5 million "starts," which is a metric that counts how many times people access the stream.