O’Reilly remains a major ‘Factor’
It’s either loyalty, curiosity or something else, but Bill O’Reilly’s ratings have surged — even as more than 50 brands that sponsor his Fox News Channel talk show have fled.
Even better for O’Reilly is that he’s in no danger of losing his job or his perch as the cable news ratings king as long as he enjoys the backing of Fox News bosses Rupert Murdoch and his sons James and Lachlan.
Make no mistake, O’Reilly is embattled, but it would take much more to push him out of Fox. Yes, dozens of advertisers fled his show following revelations in the New York Times that Fox and O’Reilly paid out $13 million to women who accused him of verbal and sexual harassment.
But the scandal seems to have actually helped draw more attention to him in the form of viewers: O’Reilly has enjoyed a 14 percent ratings bump since his advertising exodus began last week.
So while the $446 million O’Reilly has generated from commercials since 2014 is a very big deal, and losing many advertisers is a big deal, Fox News literally has dozens of other ways of minting money.
Even more to the point, while the optics are bad, the financial damage from those fleeing sponsors remains contained; most of them are moving elsewhere on the network, and Fox News makes tons and tons of money from other means besides advertising. Among its biggest revenue streams are the fees it charges cable providers like Charter, Xfinity and Optimum for the privilege of distributing its signal to viewers. And those carriage fees that Fox commands? As O’Reilly’s pal President Trump would say, they are “yuge”: around $1.50 for every subscriber according to published reports, a figure confirmed by advertising industry sources.
That may not seem like a ton of cash at first, but it adds up quickly. Doing some back-ofthe-envelope math, once you combine the more than 300 million cable subscribers across the nation, Fox News rakes in more than $500 million in fees — from just three of the largest carriers.
And there are dozens of smaller distributors out there, like Dish, RCN and MediaCom.
Does the O’Reilly scandal hurt Fox? You bet. Will he lose his job? Most likely not. He generates too much cash, gets big ratings and his biggest fans are his bosses, the Murdochs.
It’s got to be killing O’Reilly that he can’t talk about the issue; he hasn’t said a word about it on his show. But at the end of the day “The O’Reilly Factor” remains a big show with millions and millions of viewers.
His advertisers, both former and future ones, are watching too. We’re betting many, if not most, will eventually be back.
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