Friday, October 13, 2017

Fox Business Network Rides Politics To Ratings Success


The Fox Business Network , which celebrates its 10th anniversary next week, is touting robust Nielsen data showing it has won the business daytime slot  — from the time the stock market opens at 9:30 until 5 p.m. ET (an hour after its close) — beating CNBC over the past four quarters, according to a story at USAToday.

CNBC counters that it still wins across the 24-hour viewing period, the 6 a.m.-11 p.m. segment and the 8 p.m-11 p.m. period. And it also notes that Nielsen does not capture out-of-home viewers — the financial firms and Wall Street offices that play the CNBC through the business day.

CNBC may be seen in more offices, but there's no denying Fox Business Network is on the rise, says Chris Roush, professor of business journalism at the University of North Carolina.

That could be, in part, because FBN is drafting on the success of conservative-friendly Fox News. Fox Business mixes more politics into its coverage than does CNBC, Roush said. "Given that the world has become much more political, it's probably why its viewership has risen so much," he said. "The more you have stories around Trump, the better your ratings or readers."

Viewership of business networks may represent a slim slice of the overall TV viewing audience, but business news channels draw about $1 billion in annual revenue from advertising — this year an estimated $772 million for CNBC, $285 million for FBN, and $204 million for Bloomberg TV, according to Kagan, a media research group within S&P Global Market Intelligence.

More than a decade after launching Fox News Channel, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch and Fox News CEO Roger Ailes flipped the switch on the business news network. They bought into the idea of a network tackling business news differently, and the immediate financial crisis "reminded people there’s something bigger than stocks. There’s people’s homes," said 59-year-old Neil Cavuto, who migrated from CNBC in 1996. "We leapt at that and saw that for what it was and still do."


Fox Business aimed to dispense with much of the jargon that accompanied business news.  "I felt a network based on that approach of speaking English and reaching beyond ... touching the intersection of Washington and Wall Street would do well," Cavuto said. "I felt that we just had to make this about average folks."

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