Cable News Cashes in on Trump
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Despite the fact that cable news has done a completely awful job of covering Donald Trump, they are getting rich in their failure.
The cable news channels boosted their ad revenue by 40 percent last year, according to industry data released Tuesday.
That’s a stunning $394 million in additional ad revenue, ad measurement firm Standard Media Index (SMI) reported.
The New York Post says that the three cable news networks saw the average number of viewers tuning in all day grow to 4.91 million, according to SMI.
That was up 15 percent from the 4.26 million people who tuned into the three cable nets in prime time during the 2008 election, according to Pew Research.
Prime-time audiences are typically larger than all-day audiences. Average prime-time viewers in 2016 were likely larger than 4.91 million.
The added viewers tuned in to see raucous Republican primary debates, Trump-Hillary Clinton debates, candidate rallies and an unpredictable election night.
“The divisive election led to huge gains by the cable news networks both in ratings and in spending,” said Billie Gold, director of programming research at Amplifi, a division of ad agency Dentsu Aegis Network.
Fox News, the perennial ratings winner among the three, saw advertising revenue increase by 26 percent last year, according to SMI, bringing total ad revenue to $621 million.
The network ended the year as the most-watched cable network of all for the first time, topping even ESPN.
CNN, which basically turned their channel to "all Trump. all the time" CNN increased its ad revenue by 58 percent, or $196 million, to $536 million.
MSNBC saw its ad revenue rise 48 percent, or $71 million, to $219 million, according to SMI.
Sadly, none of the networks has done even a halfway decent job of covering Trump. They just know that if they put Trump's face on TV, people that love or hate him will tune in.
In other words....it's easy money and no work is required.
Quoting Trump.....SAD!
