"cavelamb" wrote in message
...

CABLE NEWS RACE
FRI., SEPT 11, 2009

FOXNEWS O'REILLY 3,212,000
FOXNEWS HANNITY 2,644,000
FOXNEWS BECK 2,544,000
FOXNEWS BAIER 1,968,000
FOXNEWS SHEP 1,705,000
MSNBC DOBERMANN 1,067,000
MSNBC MADDOW 948,000
CNN BLITZER 889,000
CNN KING 875,000 Just did.

Wes


I'm kind of curious about hos popularity translates to accuracy.

Popularity ratings like this tell us more about US than the media.

What Wes quoted are live-plus same-day ratings. If you aren't familiar with
those terms, it ain't worth it. g As for accuracy, they're accurate enough
where it matters, which is in media-buying terms.

The Nielsen game does not produce meaningful results unless you have a deep
knowledge of what you're looking at. The business issue is revenue versus
expense, just like any other business, and ratings can easily mislead you
about how a market is segmented and who is actually competing with who(m).
The rating system is designed to be used by, and to make sense to,
professional media buyers. I used to buy about $4.5 million/year, all print
and show, which means my actual experience is 'way at the low end. But it
was the central subject of my college degree.

Fox News has the biggest single segmented-market franchise in TV. Right now,
it's the only big one in cable news. I wouldn't expect that to change. But
if you're looking to derive some meaning from this in social terms, it's Fox
News against ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN, combined. All the latter list are
mass-market players who share a market largely undifferentiated by
demographics or psychographics. It's the old-time network play, a carryover
from the days when all TV was broadcast. MSNBC news and commentary is
another segment player, like Fox, only with a *much* smaller segment. It's
all that was left when they started playing the game that way. CNBC is
another segment player but they're actually after a special-interest niche
rather than a demographic or psychographic: semi-pro and smaller pro
financial people. But it still can be very profitable, if you can hold your
costs down. That's easier to do if you're a segment player than if you're a
mass-market player beating heads with three or four others of the same type.

In the non-news parts of TV, the big players are all mass-market, including
Fox. They may aim at particular demographics and psychographics, but it's a
slant rather than a segment.

There you go. Expand that to two hours, and you have the middle half of my
two-part series on media buying for broadcast. g

--
Ed Huntress