24/7 Wall St. TV: CNBC Manages To Lose 50% Of Its Audience

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Mar 11, 8:30AM EDT · Published Oct 27, 8:00PM EDT

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It may be that when the stock market is not moving up or down 20% a month that people lose interest. That seems to be the case if the new CNBC ratings are any indication. They fell 50% in October compared to the same month a year ago, according to Nielsen. During “business day” viewing hours from 5 AM to 7 PM the drop was even worse at 52%.

Jim Cramer, whose popularity has been responsible for almost all the success of TheStreet.com (NASDAQ:TSCM), has carried CNBC on his back for some time due to the high ratings of his “Mad Money” show. The ratings for the program dropped 52% in October.

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CNBC’s very small competitor Fox Business may have been smart to get cowboy shock jock, Don Imus, now nearly 70, as its morning host. He is, at least, a broadcasting stable will millions of listeners who appear to follow him anywhere and through any weather. His presence is already helping ratings at Fox Business.

The viewing public may have tired of hearing about the markets after over a year of relentlessly hysterical news which has been both terribly bad in some patches and improbably good in others.

The business networks may have to wait for decades until the next stock market crash and credit market meltdown to get all of their viewers back.

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Executive Producer: Philip MacDonald

Source: Zero Hedge

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.