Fox News Crushing Cable Rivals in Trump 2.0 Era

How’s that for a Trump bump?

Three months into the new administration, Fox News has emerged as the leading cable news network, by far, in terms of overall viewership. It’s been enough to lure back a whole host of previously Fox-skeptical advertisers, according to a recent Financial Times analysis.

In the Foxhole

Fox News’ dominance is undeniable. The network has averaged 3 million viewers during its primetime programming this year, up roughly 50% from a year ago and demolishing the roughly 1.1 million and 553,000 average primetime viewership earned by rivals MSNBC and CNN, respectively. Scratch that. Fox News has had such a strong year, its real rivals aren’t the fellow cable news networks — it’s claimed the 861 top cable news broadcasts since the end of the election, according to an AdWeek analysis of Nielsen data — but the broadcast networks like CBS and NBC. And in the period between Inauguration Day and March 10, Fox actually drew more primetime viewers than either free network player, according to the FT.

Which makes it no surprise that advertisers are ready to hop back into the Foxhole:

• Since the election, the conservative news channel has scored 125 new blue-chip advertising sponsors. Meanwhile, companies such as Netflix, Amazon, and JPMorgan have returned to running ads on Fox airwaves for the first time in two years.
• “The landscape has changed dramatically,” Jeff Collins, president of Fox ad sales, told the FT. “In today’s fragmented landscape, this audience is hard to ignore,” adding that the network has seen an unusual increase in viewership since the election, which has tended to mark a peak in previous cycles.

Streamlined: Suffice to say, Fox is one of the few players still experiencing considerable growth in the cable industry. But it has its eyes on the future as well. The company plans to launch a yet-to-be-named streaming service by the end of the year, and in late February, it hired Apple TV+ veteran Pete Distad to run it. While details are scarce, it would appear to be a direct competitor to streaming services like Netflix and Disney+, and would exist simultaneously with Fox Nation, the news-focused streaming service, and Tubi, the free ad-supported streaming service Fox already operates. And you thought the streaming wars were over.