Why Glenn Beck Is Really The Most Watched Cable News Host

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by Steve Krakauer | 1:37 pm, January 29th, 2010

» 9 comments

Glenn Beck is an absolute phenomenon on cable news – in his first year at Fox News, his ratings have skyrocketed, he’s appeared on the cover of Time and convinced one Mediaite writer he’ll be the next Oprah Winfrey.

But his program’s ratings still put him behind Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity most months in total viewers. Here’s why that’s not exactly true.

One of the ratings categories for broadcast TV is the share data, which is defined by Nielsen as: “The percent of households (or persons) using television who are tuned to a specific program, station or network in a specific area at a specific time.” (Put another way – it’s the percentage of people watching that particular channel at that particular hour, based on the total number of people watching TV at the time.) It’s used by broadcast TV, but never for cable TV – the reason being the ratings are usually so small compared to all of television the share average would be negligible.

Well not so for Fox News. We took a look at the cable ratings from 5-11pmET using the Persons Using Television (PUT) average to determine the share ratings for last week’s cable programs. And when weighted based on this average, Glenn Beck’s 5pmET show comes out on top by a significant margin.

Beck has a 5.5% share in total viewers, compared to O’Reilly at 8pmET with 4.6%, Hannity at 9pmET with 3.9% and Greta Van Susteren at 10pmET with 3.4%. In the A25-54 demographic, the breakdown was similar: Beck – 4.1%, O’Reilly – 3.1%, Hannity – 2.5%, Greta – 2.1%. (By comparison, no other cable news network reached higher than 1% share at any of those hours.)

These percentages are pretty remarkable for all of the big FNC anchors, but specifically for Beck. 5.5% of all people watching TV (broadcast and cable) were tuned to his 5pm show last week. A cable news show. Now last week happened to be an especially good week for Beck, anchored by his Communism special on Friday. Friday was his best ratings ever in both categories, and he had the top cable show in the 5pm hour in both categories as well.

But the point remains – while Bill O’Reilly continues to add to his total of consecutive months as the #1 cable news show, Beck’s ratings are better when factoring in the amount of viewers watching on all of television.

Beck appears regularly on O’Reilly’s program, and he’s currently in a joint “Bold And Fresh” speaking tour with him. They very publicly get along. But a Huffington Post story this week raised the idea of “angst amongst O’Reilly’s camp” over a poll putting Beck ahead of O’Reilly in most popular TV personality.

Who really knows? It’s an issue Don Imus brought up last week, putting Beck on the spot with some uncomfortable questions about timeslots and ratings and his FNC colleagues. Beck joked his way through most of it. But the one thing we know is Beck’s ratings are unprecedented, and at 5pmET, out of the key prime time area, they appear even more spectacular.

Here’s the Imus/Beck interview last Friday:

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Bill O'Reilly, fnc, fox news, Glenn Beck, Ratings

Moderate

“total number of people watching TV at the time.) It’s used by broadcast TV”

To get the viewers he gets, he must have a large group watching later on DVR.
http://mediaite.com Steve Krakauer

Moderate-

The current ratings as you see each day that we post are called Live+Same Day. That accounts for live viewers plus same day DVR/TiVo watchers (which are called “time adjusted” by Nielsen) for 24 hours. This is seen as the industry accepted ratings.

There are others though – I could find Live + 7 Day, and that would look a bit different.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Don-Dunn/1228610700 Don Dunn

“To get the viewers he gets, he must have a large group watching later on DVR.”

In the clip he said DVR is about 30%.
J Baustian

In the Pacific time zone, Glenn Beck comes on at 2:00 pm and repeats at 11:00 pm. Maybe he is part of the reason for poor ratings on the Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien.

If Beck is popular now, just watch as more people hear about him and set their DVRs.

Beck’s problem, and it is not a huge problem, is the 9:00 am until noon Eastern time slot for his radio show. This means he does not compete directly against Rush Limbaugh, whose show starts at noon. But Beck cannot go on the air at 9:00 am on the radio, then finish his TV show at 6:00 pm, do this five days a week, and still have time for anything else. I suppose he could tape his TV show a few hours earlier, and maybe he does some days. But he cannot move his show to prime time and still do a morning radio program.
wiseguy

Beck is getting huge numbers even though he is really getting the short end of the stick on schedule and I wouldn’t doubt if Oreilly is P’d. It’s no wonder he is going on tour with Beck. I don’t see Billy O going on tour with Hannity as SH is probably not a threat to get any bigger than he is.

Oreilly has the best schedule of all of them. He is on at 8 Eastern and 5 Pacific and then again at 11 Eastern and 8 Pacific. Beck is on at 5 Eastern and 2 Pacific and then at 11 Pacific which is really too late to do damage.

Beck essentially is not on in Primetime on the west coast and still bringing in good ratings.
If Beck had Oreilly’s timeslots he would probably get better numbers than BillyO which must really bug the Leprechaun.

I did hear a funny one from MIchael Savage talking about the three of them. He said at least O’Reilly graduated from Harvard but didn’t think Hannity and Beck had the combined intelligence to graduate from high school.
Fidoohki

I suspect that all the Huffington post ‘stories’ are actually wishful thinking. They possibly want to paint Orielly
and Beck as arrogant so they can go after them for their ‘arrogance’. Desperate times I suppose….
pyrope

In other words, Glenn Beck is simply GREAT!
MrAut

LOL! It amazes me that anyone can live on a steady diet of junk food and not get bored out of their minds. Occasionally i dip into Rush, Glenn, Hannity – can’t find Savage because he seems to keep moving from station to station. My over-riding impression is: nothing new ever happens. Underneath the superficial day-to-day events, it is always the same dirge. “Liberals control the Media” (lol!!); socialism is upon us; conspiracies everywhere; liberals are enemies of the state and must be destroyed; liberals are fascists who want to impose state-managed conformity on everyone (man if that sn’t the pot calling the kettle black)

The discourse of conservatism is a lot of things, but above all it is BORING. Beck among all of them at least tries to be somewhat entertaining while spewing his nonsense. Alas, nothing can break the tedium of their collective narrative.
MrAut

and for the record Olbermann is an insufferable windbag as well.