Donald Trump raised $9 million on Facebook Live during the third presidential debate when his campaign staged a production that looked like news programming covering the debate.
According to Politico, the Republican nominee's surrogates did interviews during the feed, including retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer. Trump did not appear.
Facebook Live is used for live broadcasting on the social media site, and users can watch the streamed events as they happen. Visitors who tuned into the live stream were greeted with a request to donate $10 or more before a midnight deadline for the campaign to submit its fundraising totals to the Federal Election Commission for the last time before the election.
The campaign broadcast two videos; one for 30 minutes before the event, and the second for 90 minutes afterward. They can be viewed on Trump's Facebook account.
More than 150,000 viewers responded, according to Trump's campaign, which said the two videos drew 24 million viewers. The Facebook feed earned around 8 million likes, shares, and comments, and the campaign called it "one of the largest debate discussions around the internet."
Trump digital marketing director Brad Parscale said that the events helped the campaign go straight to viewers and avoid traditional media, which Trump and his supporters have accused of being biased in favor of his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.
The events "gave the Trump campaign an opportunity to leverage our candidate's massive digital footprint to take our message straight to millions of voters, without the filter of the clearly biased media," Parscale said.
Trump had used Facebook Live before, prior to the second presidential debate, when he hosted a panel with there women who had previously accused Clinton's husband, former President Bill Clinton, of sexual assault.
CNN Money speculated that the events could be leading up to a launch of a Trump-branded TV news network.