Ratings for Eric Bolling's Follow The Money on Fox Business continue to amaze. And not in a good way.
In the spring, we noted that despite his star turn on Fox News where he's now part of an ensemble program, ratings for Bolling's “business” show rank as among the worst in all of cable news. Competitors such as MSNBC routinely beat him in the ten o'clock time slot by nearly one million viewers. If it it weren't for his lead-in, David Asman's America's Nightly Scoreboard, whose ratings are slightly worse, Bolling would host the lowest-rated, weekday cable news program on all of primetime television. (That includes shows on CNBC, CNN, Fox Business Network, Fox News, Headline News, and MSNBC.)
Incredibly, since the spring Bolling's Nielsen numbers have slumped even further as he loses large chunks of viewers from his already microscopic fan base. Bolling's rating dive mirrors the larger troubles at Fox Business, which posted “abysmal” ratings in October, according to Adweek. That, four years after Rupert Murdoch launched the channel and promised to revolutionize the face of television business news.
Instead, Murdoch's channel, with Bolling as a key draw, remains a little-watched outlet where hosts seem to spend more time auditioning for slots on their hyper-partisan sister channel Fox News, than they do reporting on the stock markets. (Quick! Name the last time Fox Business broke a story. Any story.....see?)
According to Nielsen viewing data for last month, Bolling's 10 p.m. show garnered just 37,000 viewers each night, down more than 20 percent from April and May, when 47,000 people tuned in. And for viewers within the desired demographic of 25-54, Bolling's show last month drew just nine thousand viewers each weeknight, a drop of nearly 30 percent from the 14,000 mark in the spring.
And yes, you read that correctly; nine thousand demo viewers, all of whom who could all fit into the bleachers at some high school football games. Keep in mind, there are 122 million Americans between the ages of 25 and 54, and each night in October nine thousand of them (or less than 0.01 percent) tuned in to watch Eric Bolling on Fox Business.
As for the program's tally of overall viewers (37,000), how's this for context: Bolling's Follow the Money has the same size audience as The Valley Reporter in Waitsfield, VT., which boasts a total circulation of 37,000 people. Of course, Bolling's program reaches homes in all 50 states, whereas The Valley Reporter reaches just a few sparsely populated counties in northern Vermont.
Yet amazingly, they both have the same size audience.