SOTU Viewership Down. . . Or Is It?

The official numbers are in, and according to Nielsen, this year's SOTU viewership was down 5 million from 2010. Tuesday night's audience clocked in at 43 million, compared to 48 million viewers last year and 52 million for Obama's first address to Congress in 2009 (which technically was not a SOTU address).

Does this indicate declining interest in what the president has to say? Or are more people simply migrating online and watching the speech over the Internet?  We have not seen any tabulations of online viewership yet.  But we suspect that many of those 5 million supposedly lost viewers simply chose to watch on their computer instead of the old idiot box.  If you happen to see any reports on online viewing numbers, please send them our way at: info@gothamghostwriters.  Thanks.

UPDATE: While this doesn't address the question of online viewership, Mashable posted a report today showing a big surge in social media commentary around the SOTU.  According to data gathered from Twitter, there were 400,000 tweets about the speech, including 100,000 during the hour the president was speaking (more than a few of those coming from the GG Tweetchat). An outfit called Tweetbeat dissected the data by keyword, and found the education to be the most mentioned subject by a nose.