One of the biggest news stories of the year, a papal conclave convened on May 7 to elect a new pope after the death of Pope Francis. After four votes across two days, the cardinals elected American Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, who took the papal name Leo XIV. On top of the tens of thousands of spectators attending in-person, millions more followed the conclave through online livestreaming, again showing the potential of the medium for news.
News channels have been steadily building up a presence in the livestreaming industry, especially on YouTube Live, across the past years. Many news organizations host constant 24/7 broadcasts, giving viewers the freedom to tune in any time they want. These free, easy-to-access channels have found great success with wildly international audiences, spanning the Americas to Southeast Asia. The papal conclave presented an interesting intersection of two growing livestreaming spheres: news and religious content.
During the 2020 pandemic lockdowns, many Christians sought an alternative to their usual mass. A product of necessity, many priests began to launch their own livestreaming channels, hosting their own masses, holding Q&A sessions, and sometimes even performing musical numbers. Priests on YouTube Live have found large audiences in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, with some even ranking within the most-watched streamers of their regions.
While the official process of choosing a new pope might not seem like typical content for the livestreaming industry, the conclave brought two of YouTube’s largest live audiences together, and ultimately, reached millions of concurrent viewers.
Following its beginning on May 7 and conclusion on the evening of May 8, the 2025 papal conclave received over 16.31M Hours Watched. This viewership was spread out across over 1,750 livestreaming channels, featuring both official news organizations and regular content creators. Between these two kinds of broadcasts, official news networks like the Vatican News enjoyed by far the highest viewership.
In total, the livestreaming industry saw 5.87M Peak Viewers concurrently follow the announcement of Pope Leo XIV. For comparison, this viewership was far higher than that of major sporting events like the Paris Olympics 2024, and it is even more than the total platform peak viewerships of Kick, Rumble, and SOOP Korea (ex-AfreecaTV), combined.
The conclave enjoyed such massive viewership thanks to its widespread global interest. Organizations and streamers from all corners of the world covered the conclave, with the most popular channels representing international English-speaking viewers, Latin Americans, and European demographics.
The Vatican’s own Vatican News network was easily the most popular network to cover the conclave. The organization has channels for many European languages, and Vietnamese, and three of their channels made an appearance in the top ten, with the main Vatican News broadcast enjoying the highest peak of over 542,000. Spanish, English, Italian, and Portuguese were the largest audiences for these channels, collectively making up over 1,000,000 Peak Viewers.
The second-most popular broadcast came from EWTN, an American Catholic television network. Just like the Vatican News channels, this was by far the most popular broadcast EWTN ever held. For comparison, generally, the peak viewership count of these channels would not exceed four digits. Christian-oriented broadcasts enjoyed an unbelievable boost in viewership, shattering their own records, but the more general news broadcasters did not record the same stratospheric increase.
Of the other news networks, only two set new personal viewership records during the conclave: CNBC-TV18 and DNews. CNBC-TV18, an English-language Indian news channel, was the most popular of all traditional news organizations and the only one to reach over 300,000 concurrent viewers. DNews represents an international Latin American audience, with the company active in many South American countries. North American viewers were also represented in this ranking, both its English and Spanish-speaking populations.
The viewership for the papal conclave in livestreaming shows how audiences across the world are accessing news and live events, and combining tradition and technology. People both young and old are turning to livestreaming for accessible, live news coverage. By leveraging this sphere, and also the growing religious side of livestreaming, the medium opens itself up to brand-new audiences.
