The ratings results are in for May and the data is looking less than good for Fox News, which appears to have lost about one-third of its total viewers since firing Tucker Carlson and about half of the important 25-54 advertising demographic critical to its ad revenues.
News on that comes from AdWeek, which reports that, in May, Fox News Channel averaged about 1.09 daytime viewers, 1.42 million primetime viewers. For the 25-54 demographic that advertisers want to see, Fox News Channel brought in about 126,000 during the daytime and 135,000 during the primetime hours.
Those are terrible results for Fox News, which AdWeek reported in April managed to bring in 1.29 million daytime viewers and 2.07 million primetime viewers for the month. It also, in April, brought in 161,000 of the 25-54 demographic in daytime and 240,000 in primetime.
That means that Fox News Channel ratings dropped by 32%, nearly a third, for primetime viewers of all ages and by 44% for the 25-54 demographic. The results were somewhat less bad during daytime programming, with FNC losing only 16% of all ages viewers and 22% in the 25-54 demographic. That’s compared to April, indicating that the ratings plummet was likely a result of Fox News getting rid of Tucker, which happened on April 21st.
And FNC’s ratings compared to other channels was bad as well. As AdWeek reported, FNC had been the top primetime channel in the basic cable lineup in April, but fell two spots to number three in May. And, while it remained the top channel for total day viewers in the basic cable package, it fell ten spots to the number fifteen show for the 25-54 demographic in primetime. That makes sense, as Tucker was the FNC host that most appealed to younger people.
FNC’s year-over-year trend was quite bad in May as well. After firing Tucker, FNC lost a quarter of its total daytime viewers and 45% of its daytime viewers in the 25-54 demographic. Things were even worse compared to May 22 for primetime, with FNC losing 38% of its total primetime viewers and a massive 62% of the primetime 25-54 demographic.
Tucker, for his part, is planning on hosting a show that will be exclusively on Twitter now that he’s been booted from Fox News. If the few videos he has posted to Twitter since his firing, all of which have brought in tens of millions of views, are any indication of how that show will go, it looks like it’ll be quite successful. Before he was fired, Tucker’s show Tucker Carlson Tonight was the top show for FNC in April
Apparently, a large percentage of FNC’s former audience has decided that it has had enough with the network and its seeming drift to the left, or at least towards the Uniparty, and have either stopped watching cable news entirely or have switched to a more conservative outlet like OANN or Newsmax. Tucker’s firing, particularly given claims it was part of FNC’s settlement with Dominion, looks like it might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back for FNC’s viewers.
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