Cable TV Audience: 2006 Annual Report | Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ)

March 13, 2006

Overview

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.
CNN’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 news’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.

Cable News Prime Time Median Audience

1998 - 2005, Channels Combined

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Source: Project for Excellence in Journalism analysis of Nielsen Media Research data, used under license

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).