Cool article in The Wall Street Journal (subscription) this morning on FNC's ever-increasing dominance--and self-confidence--in the cable biz:
IT'S FOX NEWS CHANNEL'S 10th anniversary this October. But the cable network doesn't want a diamond bauble to commemorate the occasion. It wants cold, hard cash -- and plenty of it.
Fox News executives well remember their early days, when the channel got little respect and was in the shadow of Time Warner Inc.'s CNN. While it blew by its rival almost 4 1/2 years ago in the ratings, it still trails them in one key area -- distribution fees paid by cable and satellite operators.
On that score, the News Corp.-owned channel is now looking to overtake CNN and just about every other cable channel, aiming to triple the fees it charges them to carry the channel. It wants an increase to $1 dollar per month per subscriber, from the 25 cent to 35 cent subscriber fee the network currently earns. CNN gets an average of about 50 cents per subscriber; MSNBC takes in between 30 and 35 cents.
"We're in the elite group," says Tim Carry, vice president of affiliate sales for Fox News. "We have a significant advantage over 90% of the industry, yet over the last 10 years we've been paid as if we're at the bottom."
....Fox News has more viewers than any other cable news channel with a prime-time audience of about 1.5 million viewers this year, according to Nielsen Media Research. CNN's prime-time audience this year is about 700,000 viewers while MSNBC has been averaging 350,000 viewers. Fox News's ratings are high enough to make it a top-10 cable network.
Fox News is banking that it is now one of the handful of channels which can play hardball with cable and satellite operators if negotiations stall. Like Viacom Inc.'s Nickelodeon and Disney's ESPN, Fox News has rabid fans who would howl if it wasn't part of their basic cable package. Its mix of news and talk has struck a chord with conservative viewers.
I take issue, however, with the WSJ's characterization of FNC's fans as "conservative." Most people I know who dig FNC over all the other cable newsers are, like TCG herself, straight down the middle, politically, and veering to the right or to the left on certain issues. And that's what makes us "rabid fans," I think; we're faithful to FNC because it's the only cable news channel that reports and gets out of the way to let us decide.
