Based on 24/7 Wall St. conversations with people with knowledge about recent Fox Business viewership figures, including one former executive with the network, audience numbers have hardly budged in since The Post article eleven months ago. Average hourly viewership runs between 2,000 and 8,000 during most hours from 6 AM to 6 PM. The network’s most watched prime-time shows rarely pull more than 15,000 viewers per hour.
Fox News Channel is a clear success for Rupert Murdoch. But people forget he’s got a pretty strong track record of failing: TVGuide.com failed, iGuide.com failed, Fox Sports Net as an alternative to ESPN failed (Keith Olbermann was a part of that strategy), NY Post and The Weekly Standard are money losers, and MySpace is getting spanked big time by Facebook.
Doesn’t Rupert own National Review(& NRO by extension) as well?
“Making your mark on the world is hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it. But it’s not. It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way. The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won’t. It’s whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.
—Barack Obama
Somehow I don’t think Obama was referencing running dishonest media organizations when he said that.
How much did old Rupert shell out for myspace, half a billion?
Now it’s tanking big time. All the really cool kids are on facebook now, as myspace has been taken over by porn spammers, 8h grade basement bands that suck, and Macys gift card scams.
Way to go, Rupe!
Oliver, what Obama was saying is that it took Fox News several years to begin consistently beating the shit out of CNN and MSDNC.
People who want to declare failure too quickly, generally do not find success at all.
Good thing you don’t know anybody like that. What a depressing life it would be.
“Fox News Channel is a clear success for Rupert Murdoch.”
Who wrote that? Scroll up. I’ll wait. Okay? When Fox News launched it filled a niche – no matter how nutty – and was far more consistent than the alternatives (MSNBC has had about 15 personalities in the last 10+ yrs and just recently released it might do well to have liberals hosting teevee shows). On the other hand, Fox Biz doesn’t really do anything special, and what it purports to do is better done by Bloomberg and CNBC.
I’ll agree with that. There’s no real edge there and not a whole lot to draw people in. Just another business channel, and Erin Burnett and Becky Quick are a lot easier on the eyes than the FBN announcers.
Everytime you log onto Myspace, Rupert gets a little piece of your soul and puts it in a box on his desk.
The thing is that although Fox News may be a ratings success in the United States that has come at a cost. Fox News has tarnished the Fox brand overall. Additionally the Fox News brand is all but worthless in foreign markets whereas CNN, MSNBC, Bloomberg, etc, all all strong global brands.
So yeah, Fox News has better ratings in the states but CNN is a worldwide brand.
Also keep in mind that TVGuide.com and iGuide.com were in turn built upon (or more technically, rolled out from) the failure to partner with MCI and, building off the original Delphi Internet service, crate a “serious” competitor to the likes of AOL. That was the original goal of iGuide, and was such a spectacular failure it never reached the point to claim a single paying customer.
That’s also ignoring Fox in general, which has canceled more shows than most channels have ever had in their line-up.
FOX News? I think I’ve heard of it, but like Bigfoot, I’ve never actually seen it.
Those arguments don’t hold water guys. Fox News only really cares about its brand here, and within its niche of conservatives, it does well. In the rest of the world News Corp has Sky News. And Fox broadcast is #1 thanks to American Idol. I don’t see that they cancel any more shows than the rest of the broadcast networks. Certainly not as many as NBC in the last 5-6 years.