CNBC Ratings Continue to Decline

Wall Street Cheat Sheet's Damien Hoffman has gained some of CNBC's ratings, which show the business network continuing to hemorrhage viewers compared to this period last year.  It is worth noting however that a great number of viewers tuning to CNBC this time last year are not what would be considered the networks traditional audience.  As the financial crisis continued into 2009, more general viewers tuned to the channel for the latest news.

Hoffman writes;

"Once again, CNBC has continued to lose viewers after failing to help anyone save money during the Great Crash of 2008. The newest Nielsen Media Research numbers show Business Day (5am-7pm) down 24% P2+ (total households) and down 37% in the A25-54 demographic.  Primetime, CNBC is down 34% P2+ and down 25% in the A25-54 demo (Monday through Friday).

That’s a significant drop. Is it those pesky video games? Maybe it’s iPhone apps. Nah. It’s definitely correlated to the value CNBC offers to our investment accounts."

In his assessment of the figures, and subsequent post thought on the matter, Hoffman notes that CNBC has been using the excuse of inflated viewer figures through the financial crisis as the reason for the sudden large declines now.  He notes that the excuses are starting to wear thin.

Whilst this is a fair assessment, a notion of caution is required.  If the declines continue into the second quarter of this year, it would then be absolutely fair and right to hold CNBC to account over its declines, but at this point the reasoning used by the business network still holds water.

One other interesting aspect of this, CNBC is garnering negative attention over its loss of viewers year on year, but we're still yet to see figures from both of its competitors, namely Bloomberg Television, and of course Fox Business.  As there is nothing to compare the figures to and create a benchmark, or average, its a tad unfair to lambast CNBC outright on the decline in viewers.