Fox News leads CNN in ratings, but is having trouble charging as much for ads as its rival, according to yesterday’s WSJ. This partially has to do with Fox’s strategy of undercutting on price when it was started, and with CNN being owned by one of the big cable providers, but also with the quality of the “news.” One media buyer says, “The Fox News Channel is not perceived as pure news, because it really is no different than talk radio,” and therefore isn’t worth as much to advertisers.
They’re not hurting, mind you, with ad revenues running at about a million dollars a day. But it’s still heartening to hear that partisan nonsense doesn’t pay quite as well as actual news.