Jon Stewart's final 'Daily Show' is the series' second-most watched episode

Even with all the excitement surrounding Jon Stewart's final episode of "The Daily Show," it came just shy of being the series' most-watched episode.

A Comedy Central press release reports that 3.5 million people tuned into "The Daily Show" on Thursday night, according to Nielsen live plus same day ratings. A total 1.8 million of them belonged to the advertiser-desired audience of Adults, aged 18 to 49 years old.

For total viewers, that made Stewart's farewell episode second behind the 3.6 million viewers who tuned into President Barack Obama's appearance on the October 29, 2008 episode.

The network points out that Thursday's episode still beat out several other talk show host departures in both total viewers and the advertiser demo, including "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" (February 20, 2009), "The Colbert Report" (December 18, 2014), "Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson" (December 19, 2014) and "Chelsea Lately (August 26, 2014).

Additionally, Hulu counts an extra one million full episode views of Stewart's farewell on its service.

The finale was the No. 1 most socialed episode of the series. On Twitter, 117,000 people wrote 233,400 tweets on Friday and 4.3 million people saw those tweets for a total of 26.4 million times.