Pew: MSNBC Loses Quarter of Primetime Audience

Pew: MSNBC Loses Quarter of Primetime Audience

According to Pew, year-over-year numbers show that the business of left-wing cable news is in trouble. The cable news viewing audience overall declined for everyone, but MSNBC lost 24% of its primetime audience. CNN dropped 13%. Fox only lost 6%.

 

Those percentages are even more graphic when you consider how few viewers CNN and MSNBC have to begin with, especially when compared to Fox News. Fox beats both of its left-wing competitors combined with 1.75 million viewers. Only 619k tune into MSNBC, while CNN comes in third (for the fourth year) with 543k viewers.

Daytime viewership was especially bad for MSNBC. Both CNN and Fox News increased viewers over last year: 12% and 2%, respectively. MSNBC lost a whopping 15.5% of its daytime audience.

In revenue, Fox News jumped 5%, CNN increased by 2%, and MSNBC decreased by 2%.

All three networks benefit greatly by cable licensing fees. CNN’s revenue is 64% licensing fees. Fox is 58% and MSNBC is 51%.

 

This is how low-rated networks like CNN and MSNBC stay in business. They could never survive at the level they do with such low-ratings on advertising alone. Advertising revenue is based on eyeballs. Bundled cable — forcing tens of millions of Americans to purchase expensive cable packages — is what keeps these left-wing networks afloat.

The trend of people cutting the cord and dumping pay TV is a much bigger threat to CNN and MSNBC.  

If that isn’t reason enough for Breitbart readers to cancel their cable packages, I don’t know what is.

 

Follow  John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC                 

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