Ratings, readers up big due to Wall Street turmoil

Andrew Hampp of Advertising Age writes Wednesday about the big increases in readers and viewers seen by business media outlets in the past week due to the economic turmoil.

Hampp writes, “CNBC, for instance, saw ratings for the 3 p.m. hour of its Wall Street news program ‘Closing Bell’ increase 70% last week, up 254,000 total viewers from the week of Sept. 8 to Sept. 12, according to Nielsen data. The 4 p.m. hour also saw a boost, up 247,000 total viewers from the prior week. Similarly, CNN’s ‘Lou Dobbs Tonight’ grew in total viewers by 34,000 over the previous week.

“On the web, nytimes.com achieved its highest daily total page views Monday, Sept. 15, with the Business section reporting a 54% increase in page views from the previous Monday. CNN’s cnnmoney.com doubled its traffic to 4 million unique users each weekday from 2 million since Sept. 14. Smartmoney.com also saw a traffic boost of about 30%, while Yahoo Finance has more than doubled unique visits since last week. All web-traffic data were provided to Horizon by the individual media companies.

“Although the affected banks — particularly Bank of America — are among the media companies’ biggest advertising clients, Bill Koenigsberg, president-CEO of Horizon Media, said marketers who traditionally advertise with the business media are probably getting an efficient boost in their media spend.”

Read more here.