Dobbs has breakout year at Fox Business

Tom Kludt of CNNMoney.com writes about Fox Business Network anchor Lou Dobbs, who had a stellar 2016.

Kludt writes, “Viewership for ‘Lou Dobbs Tonight,’ which airs nightly on Fox Business at 7 p.m. ET, spiked nearly 200% from 2015 to 2016, according to Nielsen. Among viewers aged 25-54, the demographic most coveted by advertisers, the show saw a jump of 282% last year.

“It was also the best year ever for Fox Business, which launched in 2007. The network gave its mothership, Fox News Channel, a foothold in the realm of financial news, and an opportunity to challenge the king of the genre, CNBC. But it spent much of the last decade struggling to catch its rival. At the end of the last year, Fox Business claimed to have its first ever quarterly win in business and total day viewers over CNBC. (CNBC largely uses services other than Nielsen to track ratings in order to capture out of home viewing.)

“Dobbs’ show averaged 266,000 viewers a night last year, which Fox said made it ‘the number one program in business television.’

“Internally, many at CNBC view Fox Business as less of a rival in the financial news sector than Bloomberg News.

“That’s because Fox Business, save for the stock ticker at bottom of the screen, often looks and sounds like nothing more than the conservative political coverage found on Fox News. 90% of viewers who watched at least six minutes of Dobbs also watched at least an hour of Fox News, according to Nielsen data from the fourth quarter of last year.”

Read more here.