Laura Ingraham’s Ratings Are Up 16 Percent Since The David Hogg Controversy
Laura Ingraham’s ratings are up 16 percent since a controversy in March over her poorly-received remarks about Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg, The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting.
It’s been roughly six weeks since Hogg called for a boycott of Ingraham’s sponsors, following a tweet in which the Fox News host accused the 17-year-old of “whining.” As the Inquisitr reported at the time, at least two dozen advertisers on her show, The Ingraham Angle, quit the show. Those advertisers included Mitsubishi, IBM, and SlimFast, among others.
Ingraham then took a week-long “vacation” that she insisted had been planned.
Now a month and a half later, it appears that Ingraham is killing it in the ratings. Specifically, her show is bringing in, on average, 2.656 million viewers nightly, with roughly 553,000 of those coming from the 25- to 54-year-old demographic (the age group advertisers most want to target). Prior to the Hogg controversy, she was bringing in 2.284 million total viewers, and 471,000 from the coveted age group.
She’s also smashing her competition. The other cable news/commentary shows in her time slot, MSNBC’s The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell and CNN Tonight are bringing in 2.253 million and 1.005 million, respectively.
Joe Concha, a media reporter for The Hill, says that it’s no surprise that Ingraham not only survived the Hogg debacle but thrived in its wake.
“Fox News audiences, and I’ve been told this by the people at the highest levels at other networks, are the most loyal in television. It’s an us-versus-them mentality that is bigger than any one host. And in this case, they weren’t got [sic] to sit by and watch another host they like go down over something so silly.”
Did team Obama spy on the Trump campaign? Andy McCarthy and Scott Bolden with reaction right now! pic.twitter.com/AFWrhf0a2N
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) May 30, 2018
In fact, according to WAND-TV (Springfield, Illinois), the boycott had little to no effect on Fox News’ bottom line. That’s because, according to advertising research, analytics, and media planning software company SQAD LLC, the way advertising is sold protects networks from advertiser boycotts.
In essence, advertisers purchase what the industry calls “up fronts,” meaning they pay in advance for so many minutes of advertising. When an advertiser decides to pull its sponsorship from one show, they don’t get their money back, and all they can do is move their advertising around on the host network.
“In analyzing the data from MediaCosts: National, we can clearly see that the impact of the boycott on Laura Ingraham’s program – initiated by tweets she made after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting – was limited on the network’s bottom-line.”
