While I’m still trying to dig up the final figure that tuned into YouTube last night to watch the Presidential debate, my guess is that we’re talking about 10′s of millions of viewers.

And despite the popularity of the debate being broadcast on YouTube, they definitely weren’t the only winners as President Obama, and Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney squared off in the first Presidential debate.

Presidential Debate on YouTube

Last night was the first time in history that a Presidential debate was broadcast live on YouTube, in conjunction with ABC News.

And again, I’m hoping to find the numbers of viewers here shortly and will update this article with that figure.

While watching the Presidential debate on Youtube last night, one thing I noticed immediately was that the YouTube stream of the debate was actually ahead of the broadcast on the TV.

I found that particularly strange, and was wondering how live TV was actually lagging behind YouTube.

If you missed the Presidential debate, you can actually watch the whole thing in its entirety on YouTube again here.

Presidential Debate on Twitter

However, YouTube wasn’t the only online platform to score big last night during the Presidential debate.

Twitter also had a record night during the Presidential debate.  According to Twitter, the presidential debate between President Barack Obama and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney generated 10.3 million tweets in only 90 minutes.

This is a political event record according to the government’s Twitter feed and confirmed via Twitter’s official blog.  Here’s a chart of tweets that maps out the reaction on Twitter as people watched the Presidential debate.

Big Bird & The Presidential Debate

Finally, all of this would be for nothing if we didn’t mention the big winner on Twitter last night during the Presidential debate and that was Big Bird from Sesame Street.  

During the debate, Mitt Romney was talking about how we wanted to cut Federal funding for PBS (Public Broadcast Station) in an effort to reduce spending and the deficit.

And during the discourse, Romney mentioned how fond he was of Big Bird, the Sesame Street character.  This mention set off a firestorm on Twitter,

According to the chart above, when Big Bird was mentioned at 9:24pm, the name Big Bird was being tweeted at a record pace of 135,332 tweets per minute.  Ultimately more than a quarter million tweets were fired off talking about Big Bird.

Way to Big Bird!

So what did you think of the Presidential debates last night?

And were you part of the millions who watched on YouTube and tweeted on Twitter?