Later this year, everyone at Fox News will be celebrating the network reaching its 20th anniversary as a round-the-clock cable mainstay. For much of that two-decade span, especially in recent years, Fox News has been the king of the ratings, and it looks like 2016 will stunningly be the network's best year yet, and we're only halfway through.For much of that two-decade span, especially in recent years, Fox News has been the king of the ratings, and it looks like 2016 will stunningly be the network's best year yet, and we're only halfway through.
Through two quarters of 2016, Fox News Channel can boast the highest ratings that it has ever earned, and that's across both the all-important primetime viewers.as well as the total day viewers. You can't hope for news that's more fantastic than that, and the network's big numbers are undoubtedly connected to the extremely high-profile presidential race, which hit various fever pitches over the past six months as Donald Trump took hold of the GOP and the democratic nominee race raged on between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Fox News even got to take advantage of a brief spat between Trump and Megyn Kelly.
Now, this doesn't mean that Fox News was actually on top in either the primetime or total day viewerships for this past quarterly review, but it wasn't at all far off. The network took second place in all cable channels for the primetime hours, predictably falling behind TNT, which brought in an average of 1.97 million viewers during some particularly exciting NBA Playoffs telecasts. However, FNC did edge out ESPN, which was also heavy with NBA games during the Q2 period, according to TheWrap. Coming in fourth and fifth for cable primetime were TBS and HGTV.
Fox News was also #2 when it comes to total viewers per day. It couldn't manage to top Nickelodeon on that front, though, as kids and their cartoons are an extremely tough demographic to top when accounting for all of the hours in a day. Rounding out this top five are Adult Swim, TNT and HGTV.
Beating out its cable news rivals is nothing new for Fox News at this point. It has topped all competition for 58 straight quarters, despite occasionally dealing with suspensions and ridiculous Internet backlashes and other messy situations. In comparison, CNN came in tenth place for primetime viewers and took eleventh for total day viewers, while MSNBC came in at #14 and #16 in the respective categories. Fox News' dominance is even more obvious when you look at ratings for individual news programs, since the network currently has 14 of the 15 most-watched shows, with only MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show breaking into that bunch at #10. Anderson Cooper 360, CNN's highest-rated show, didn't show up until seventeenth place.
One has to assume Fox News' success will continue throughout the year as the upcoming presidential election gets nearer. It'll be interesting to see how next year compares.
