C-SPAN's Large TikTok Audience Shows Appetite For Political Access

As U.S. consumers flock to streaming (both on-demand and vMVPDs), many are also inadvertently losing access to C-SPAN in the process. Neither YouTube TV nor Hulu (other streamers are holdouts as well) carry C-SPAN, and that's leading to fewer viewers having access to its programming, which you could argue is a public good. Understanding this, a bipartisan U.S. Senate coalition is now fighting for C-SPAN carriage, as the Washington Post reported on Thursday.

While larger publications (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, etc.) share clips of what occurs in both the House of Representatives and Senate, these are typically short clips with limited context around the larger proceedings – and also find themselves intermingled with videos of a variety of other topics; with some of those not political at all.

C-SPAN, for what it's worth, has been circumventing the decreased access via streaming with an increased presence on TikTok. And as a result, it's shown just how much demand there is for their specific brand of content and government access – an unbiased accounting of events that others do not currently provide, and cannot provide in the longer formats C-SPAN is capable of.

• Tubular Labs data shows that since the start of 2025, C-SPAN has generated 414 million views on TikTok, a platform that is full of the exact group of young people being cut off by a lack of streaming access to C-SPAN via major vMVPDs.
• Compare that to what The New York Times (209 million views) and The Wall Street Journal (97.6 million views) pages – doesn't include all owned accounts owned by NYT or WSJ – have generated since the start of the year, and it would appear the demand is there to justify the estimated spend of $15 million it would cost to carry C-SPAN as a not-for-profit media entity.
• C-SPAN videos are also longer formats than what's typical on TikTok: 53% of uploads in 2025 are over two minutes long, and 11% are more than five minutes long.

At a time when U.S. public trust in government has dropped to historic lows (Pew Research shows its lowest levels over the last decade), access to C-SPAN seems more essential to the American people than ever before.