Cable TV Audience

Fox Leads the Ratings Pack

By either measurement, one thing is clear: Fox News channel was the ratings leader in 2005. Wherever one looks, more than half the cable news audience was watching Fox News.

In the evenings, or prime time, an average of 1.59 million people watched Fox News in 2005, up from 1.47 million in 2004. That is more than double the 725,000 watching CNN, whose median prime time viewership dropped by 90,000, from 815,000 in 2004. MSNBC had a median prime time audience in 2005 of 335,000 viewers, slightly less than the 341,000 viewers a year earlier.

During the day, 901,500 people watched Fox News at any given moment. The median audience of CNN was less than half that number, at 448,500. Roughly half that number again watched MSNBC— 229,500 (an increase for the channel from 224,000 a year earlier).

Where did Fox News’s growth come from? The evidence suggests two places.

First, Fox News has eaten into its competition’s audience. Over the past four years, its share has been growing at a faster rate than the cable audience has, indicating that it is taking viewers away from the other channels.

Yet Fox’s increases are greater than the losses suffered by CNN and MSNBC. So some of its growth also came from new viewers, people who were not watching cable news at all. That growth appears to derive mostly from new distribution as Fox News was added to cable systems that previously did not have access to the channel, rather than from people who chose to stop watching non-news alternatives.3

Ratings vs. Cume: CNN Still ‘Unique’

Despite the ratings data, CNN has always made the argument that it is more popular over all than Fox News because more people, or unique viewers, watch it. This remained true in 2005 as well, though the gap was narrowing.

This number, called “cumulative audience” or “Cume,” is different from the ratings numbers discussed above. Ratings measure how many people in total watched a channel at any given moment. Cume refers to how many different people watch the channel over time — equivalent to the online industry’s “unique visitors.” Viewers are counted as part of a TV channel’s Cume measurement if they tune in for six minutes or longer (they are averaged over the course of a month).

CNN argues that Cume figures are better indicators of overall popularity for cable news.

Cable News Cumulative Audience

Number of Unique Viewers, October 2003 to December 2005

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Nielsen Media Research, data provided by CNN

This problem of ratings vs. Cume was not an issue in the old days of broadcast television. In the 1960s and 1970s, most households watching TV at the news hours were watching one of the three networks, rather than myriad other channels as well. Thus, ratings and share data told us what most Americans were watching.

The argument is that in a niche landscape of hundreds of channels, when the majority of viewers are elsewhere, Cume is a measurement of the popularity of a news channel’s overall brand instead of its specific programs.

Even on this measurement, 2005 gave CNN reason to be concerned. While it continued to attract more unique viewers than Fox News, the gap has narrowed slightly.

In 2005, the pattern of cumulative audience showed that on an average, CNN got about 7 million more unique viewers a month than Fox News. Comparing this to 2004, CNN’s lead over Fox News has been cut in half.4

A pair of stories illustrates CNN’s unique appeal when major international news breaks. The 2005 gap between the two was very high in January after the Tsunami hit Asia . In that month, 76.8 million different people watched CNN, 12 million more than Fox News. The gap narrowed substantially in February (a difference of a million viewers) and then peaked again in April at the time of the Pope’s death and succession (a difference of nine million viewers).5

Cable News Prime Time Viewership

1998 - 2005, by Channel

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Nielsen Media Research, used under license

In other words, Fox has a more loyal audience that watches for longer periods of time — what advertisers want. Yet CNN commands a larger pool of casual viewers who tune in for key news moments.

The best example of that was Hurricane Katrina. During September, when people tuned in to get news of the disaster, decidedly more people chose to get it from CNN – 100 million unique viewers, the highest viewership among all the cable channels.6

Not only that, CNN’s prime time audience more than doubled in that month (an increase of 168%) and its daytime audience more than tripled (210%) from what it was in August. Fox News’s audience, on the other hand, saw only 35% growth in prime time from its August figure, and 106% growth in daytime. During September, indeed, CNN’s ratings – not just cumulative audience – actually exceeded those for Fox News.7

Viewers in Thousands

Viewers in Thousands

Source: Nielsen Media Research, used under license

Beyond Katrina, survey results also reinforce the idea that over time more unique viewers still turn to CNN, though the gap has narrowed considerably. A poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in June 2005 found that 24% of Americans said they get “most of their news about national and international issues” from CNN, compared with 22% from Fox (and 7% from MSNBC).

Fox News’s overall ratings success suggests that it has a deep appeal to its core audience. For CNN, the numbers suggest that it still has brand appeal, though smaller than it once had. But CNN continues to have the same problem it has had for more than a decade. People tend to view it as a utilitarian channel, something to get headlines from, rather than something that offers them distinct programs they want to watch regularly. There also may be a caution here for CNN. Might the extra people who tune in during major events also turn elsewhere if they think they can get the information faster or better from another source, especially if the Internet grows as a rival medium?