http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2006/narrative_cabletv_audience.asp?cat=3&media=6
This will really frost the libs
Audience
By the Project for Excellence in Journalism
When it comes to the audience for cable news, four questions stand out:
Is the cable audience still growing?
How dominant is Fox News?
Can CNN still claim, ratings aside, that more people look at it over the course of a month?
Is MSNBC making any headway?
The answers heading into 2006 looked like this:
The audience for cable news was still growing, but not by much and not across the board.
One channel, Fox News, continued to drive the growth, while its principal rivals, MSNBC and CNN, continued to suffer ratings declines.
CNN still leads in the number of different people who watch it over the course of the month, allowing it to maintain its claim to be a rival to Fox News.
CNNÂ’s Headline News emerged as a new contender in the cable news landscape. It managed to surpass MSNBC to become the third most watched channel in 2005.
Underlying all these developments is the realization that cable newsÂ’s natural growth may be reaching a point of saturation. Most people now have access to all three cable news channels (Fox News, MSNBC and CNN). That makes significant growth of new subscribers unlikely. And as easier broadband access makes the Internet a more attractive medium for audio-visual news, each channel will have to work harder to hold on to current audiences, let alone attract new ones.
Cable Audiences Grew, Gradually
Overall viewership of cable news grew 2.8% in 2005 over 2004. That figure, new in this report, refers to the total number of people watching cable news, i.e., the sum of all viewers watching either daytime news or prime time news — or both — through the year.1
When viewership is divided into the two important segments of the day, prime time and daytime, the numbers reveal more significant growth in the evening, when the channels are oriented to producing “programs” rather than tracking the news of the day.
In prime time ( 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. ), there was a 4% growth in median audience of the three main cable news channels. The number of viewers watching cable news during prime time was 2.7 million, up from 2.6 million in 2004. This builds on the 3% improvement in 2003, but falls short of the 6% growth seen in 2004. And it is a long way off from the dramatic surge in prime time median audiences in 2001 and 2002.
The overall growth of daytime viewership ( 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. ) was similarly modest. In 2005, daytime median audience grew by three percent, from 1.56 million to 1.60 million viewers. That was down from the 5% growth rate in 2004 (from 1.48 million to 1.56 million).
Only Fox News Is Growing
The overall prime time and daytime numbers, however, are deceiving, since all of the growth in viewership at the three main cable news operations was due to Fox News channel. The other channels actually saw declines in their median audience.
In prime time, Fox NewsÂ’s median viewership rose by 9%. CNN and MSNBC had losses of 11% and 2% respectively.
In daytime, too, Fox News was responsible for most of the growth in cable; its viewership rose by 5%, while CNN recorded a loss of 7%. MSNBC also had good daytime performance, ending the year with a gain of 3%.
Introduced as a rival to CNN in 1996, Fox News barely competed with the cable news giant in its initial years. Between late 2000 and 2003, however, Fox News made dramatic gains to overtake not just MSNBC, but CNN as well. It emerged as the leader in the ratings race in April 2003. Since then, Fox NewsÂ’s ratings success shows little sign of wearing off (see Previous Reports).
Measuring the Audience
This report calculates cable ratings as median averages. Our research team believes that the median is the fairest way to try to understand the core audience for cable, given the volatility of ratings spikes during unusual news events. The cable channels themselves usually calculate their year-to-year ratings as simple averages, which are disproportionately inflated by ratings driven by major news events and exaggerate the declines in cable audiences when those spikes donÂ’t happen (See 2005 Report for fuller explanation).
If one calculates the cable ratings in 2005 by a simple average, or mean, as the cable channels do, the picture is much flatter, except for CNN. The average prime time audience over all rose less than a percent (0.2%). While CNN saw a gain of one percent, Fox News grew less than that (0.2%) and MSNBCÂ’s viewership fell by 1%.
