Year to Year Growth | Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ)

March 15, 2005

There are a number of ways to calculate year-to-year ratings. Typically, the cable networks take each month of ratings and calculate an arithmetic average. That number tends to take maximum advantage of momentary audience spikes.

Given the volatility of cable news audiences, however, that may not be the best way to measure cable's core audience, that is, the audience it gets most of the time. It also tends to punish cable in the years that there are no major news events, and reward it unduly when there are.

A more accurate way to assess cable's core audience is to use the median -- a measurement that captures the midpoint between a channel's highest and lowest viewership.

Comparing 2004 and 2003, overall median primetime cable news viewership rose by 6%, from 2.45 million to 2.60 million. The daytime median audience rose 5%, from 1.48 million to 1.56 million.

Thus the cable news audience grew in 2004, but it is now growing at a much slower rate than just two years ago. The 6% growth for primetime audience in 2004 follows a very modest 3% median audience growth rate in 2003 over the year before. Compare that with 2002, when the median audience grew by 41%, or 2001, when it grew by 32%.

Prime Time Cable News Median Audience

All networks, 1998 to 2004

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Nielsen Media Research unpublished data

What's more, had it not been for three months covering the conventions and the election, overall cable viewership would have been even flatter. To get a sense of the ratings boost provided by the final months of the election campaign, consider what the median audience looked like for the 12 months ending in August 2004. During that time, the total number of viewers of cable news fell by 4% from the same twelve-month period the year before.

Prime Time Cable News Audience Growth

Annual growth rate, all networks, 1999 to 2004

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Nielsen Media Research unpublished data

How would things look if audience data were calculated the way the cable channels do it, using the arithmetic mean average? Calculating the data this way, the cable news audience fell by 12% in 2004, from 3.22 million viewers in 2003 to 2.84 million. The daytime audience dropped even more, by 21%, to 1.61 million. Yet as we said before, we believe this drop overstates things because it tends to exaggerate the impact of the audience spike during the war in Iraq in the spring of 2003.

Prime Time Cable News Average Audience

All networks, 1998 to 2004