2005 Annual Report - Cable TV Audience

The other issue when it comes to understanding the cable audience is the question of total audience, or how many different people watch cable through the course of the day. Ratings measure how many people are watching at any given moment, which is a fine measurement for advertisers who want to know how many eyeballs may watch a particular spot. And it makes sense for broadcast television, where each program is a unique offering.

For cable, however, in which the network provides a similar product for many hours of the day, ratings are incomplete. In trying to assess where people get their news, it is useful also to know how many different people are going there. In the TV business, this measurement is known as "cume" (as in cumulative); it's analogous to the online industry's measurement of "unique visitors."

CNN has long argued that despite its lag in ratings- the number of sets tuned to it nationwide at a given time -- more people over all watch it. The Project obtained monthly "cume" ratings from CNN for the fall of 2003 and all of 2004. (Viewers are counted as part of a channel's "cume" measurement if they watch for six minutes or longer.) The data show that indeed, CNN consistently gets more "unique viewers" -- the total number of viewers who tune to the channel at some point during a given month -than Fox. The pattern is as consistent as the ratings pattern: CNN holds a sizable lead in this measurement, which is called cumulative audience. Fox News is in second place, and MSNBC last. In the typical month some 64 million different people tune to CNN at some point. Fox generally attracts 56 million individual viewers. MSNBC lags behind with 48 million.

The pattern of cumulative viewership showed CNN leading Fox News by a margin of 5 million viewers or more for most of 2004. The gap narrowed slightly in September and October but widened again in November. CNN reached its highest cume in recent months in December 2003, the month of Saddam Hussein's capture; in all, 77.8 million different people watched CNN that month, according to Nielsen.

Cumulative Cable News Audience

October 2003 to December 2004

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Nielsen Media Research unpublished data

The numbers suggest that CNN is still the first choice for people trying to get a fix on the latest breaking news. For example, on Election Day, CNN beat out Fox in unique viewers by 6 million -- 38 million for CNN, 32 million for Fox. MSNBC was far behind with 19 million. Given that CNN is the default option for so many people looking for cable news, the size of Fox News's ratings margin over CNN is particularly striking.

CNN argues that its higher cume makes it a better choice for advertisers because its ads will reach more people over the course of a given day. Fox News argues that CNN's "cume" figures don't matter because they're simply a measurement of "channel surfers." Indeed, in advertisements in trade magazines that reach the media planners who make decisions about where to place ad budgets, Fox has taken that argument a step further by arguing, "If CNN's advertising is misleading, why would you trust their journalism?"²

Last year, while we didn't have CNN's "cume" figures, we found evidence to support its argument in survey data. More people told pollsters that they watched CNN than Fox, which seemed to support the cumulative audience idea.

This year, however, the survey data support Fox's hold on viewers.

The Pew Research Center's 2004 poll on media consumption showed for the first time that Fox News had surpassed CNN as the preferred outlet for cable news. Fox News was cited as a "regular" source of news by 25% of people in Pew's latest survey, up from 22% in 2002; CNN dropped three points, to 22%, from 25% in 2002.

Types of Cable News Viewers

By network, June 2004

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, "News Audiences Increasingly Politicized," June 6, 2004

So which measure is most meaningful? Ratings, CNN's "cume" data or survey research? Each yardstick has its own strengths and weaknesses. Research conducted by an academic team at Ball State University in 2004- involving surveys, consumers filling out "diaries," and researchers observing media use first hand -- also found that survey data appear to consistently undercount media use. People simply use media more than they tell or can recall when surveyed, by magnitudes of three and four times.³

Ratings are the closest thing advertisers have to determining how many eyeballs may see an ad at a given moment.

Taken together, however, the data suggest that the picture is more complicated than ratings alone suggest. If you want to know which network more people watch, Fox and CNN apparently are much closer than if you ask which network has higher ratings at any given moment.

This gap between CNN's ability to attract an audience and its inability to keep viewers around for the long haul is the main challenge facing the network. But it is also a sign that the cable audience is not monolithic. The data suggest that it is worth looking at cable news in terms of two separate audiences: the day-to-day core audience and the occasional, "news on demand" audience. While Fox News has a larger core audience, CNN may be the winner when it comes to the "news on demand" people.