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As a percentage of the population almost no one watches cable news. Fox's best nights sometimes approach a significant fraction of one percent of the nations p
by VLM 11y ago
As a percentage of the population almost no one watches cable news. Fox's best nights sometimes approach a significant fraction of one percent of the nations population, usually less. And all other channels are far, far lower ratings.
Another thing to consider is MSNBC is also nearly unwatched. If you thought 28K AJ viewers during daytime was bad, imagine MSNBC at exactly half or 14K viewers. Given deep enough pockets, AJ could have continued.
Narrowcasting is strange, watching channels fight over almost no viewers is like watching academics fight over nothing. Yet supplying the almost no viewers with an internet feed would require quite a few gigs/sec of internet bandwidth. There's quite a wide, unserved gap in the media industry between "a couple people watch me on youtube" and "I have a cable TV channel". There's probably a startup opportunity in there, somehow.
- chipotle_coyote 11y agoIf you thought 28K AJ viewers during daytime was bad, imagine MSNBC at exactly half or 14K viewers. While I don't think you're intentionally cherry-picking numbers here, I'm fairly sure you're quoting a Mediaite article about AJAM beating MSNBC during the 2PM newscast in mid-2015. Those are not total viewership numbers. If you want to compare cable news networks, it'd be better to compare their primetime viewerships. AJAM had trouble breaking 30K in primetime, according to the NYT, but at least as of August 2015 (the most recent data I can find), MSNBC's primetime total viewership was 639K -- actually beating CNN slightly. As for "almost no one watches cable news," well: yes, but. Given how much of the HN discussion is centering around cord cutting, it's worth considering how many people get their news from the web sites of CNN and friends. In January 2015, for instance, cnn.com had over 64M unique visitors; foxnews.com had about 55M, while nbcnews.com had about 30M -- even though NBC News has far more viewers than CNN (nearly 10M compared to CNN's under 1M). Sources: http://www.mediaite.com/tv/al-jazeera-america-beat-msnbc-for-2-hours-in-the-key-25-54-ratings-demo/ http://www.mediaite.com/tv/al-jazeera-america-beat-msnbc-for... http://www.mediaite.com/tv/august-2015-ratings-fox-news-1-in-all-primetime-cable-msnbc-last-in-demo/ http://www.mediaite.com/tv/august-2015-ratings-fox-news-1-in... http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/business/media/al-jazeera-america-to-shut-down-in-april.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/business/media/al-jazeera-... http://www.journalism.org/2015/04/29/cable-news-fact-sheet/ http://www.journalism.org/2015/04/29/cable-news-fact-sheet/ http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/abc-david-muir-nbc-lester-holt-evening-news-ratings-1201677863/ http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/abc-david-muir-nbc-lester-ho...