MSNBC made long term agreements with cable and satellite companies. They get carriage fees even with few viewers.
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David Bauder at the Associated Press gave an overview of the situation on March 29, in the following two paragraphs:
Despite the ratings, analyst SNL Kagan predicts MSNBC will earn $509 million in revenue this year. While that's below Fox News Channel ($2.18 billion) and CNN ($1.16 billion), that would still be slightly up from $501 million in 2014, Kagan said. The financial health is largely due to long-term deals with cable and satellite operators to carry MSNBC, made when the network sold itself as a counterbalance to Fox News, said Derek Baine, Kagan analyst. Bad ratings depress advertising prices, and while they would hurt MSNBC's future if they persist, the advertising is not as important as the carriage deals.
The following charts found at an October 2014 Pew Research post confirm how ridiculous the situation is:
........ Carriage fees, described in the following paragraph from a separate Pew report, explain why CNN and MSNBC contine to grow even as their audience declines:
All cable channels, including news channels, charge a fee each month to cable providers like Comcast in exchange for the provider’s right to carry those channels in their packages. Providers, in turn, pass along those fees to consumers in the form of their monthly bills. Among the 12 news channels studied for this report—including CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC —license fee revenue amounted to an estimated $2.8 billion in 2013, accounting for the majority of TV audience revenue as well as about half of cable news channels’ total revenue.
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- See more at: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2015/04/24/rush-limbaugh-wonders-how-cnn-and-msnbc-can-still-be-air-heres-how#sthash.ftDFqgU4.dpuf |
