Fox Business tops CNBC in total viewers for 6th-straight month

Fox Business Network continued its success against CNBC at the start of the year by delivering its first back-to-back quarterly win over its rival in total viewers during the business day, according to Nielsen Media Research. 

Fox Business’s March performance marked its sixth month as TV’s top business network as it registered an average of 212,000 viewers from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., while CNBC averaged 183,000 total viewers during that time period. 

CNBC did beat Fox Business by a narrow margin in the key 25-54 demographic during Business Day hours, however, capturing an average of 35,000 viewers to Fox Business’s 31,000. 

{mosads}Overall, “all of FBN’s business programming saw double digit increases year over year, while CNBC tied for its third lowest rated month ever,” according to a Fox Business release. 

CNBC announced in 2015 that it will no longer rely on Nielsen ratings to measure its daytime audience, turning to rival Cogent Reports instead.

The financial network made the switch after complaining for years that Nielsen fails to track “out of home” viewing in locations such as airports, gyms, restaurants and offices.

Fox Business Vice President of Programming Gary Schreier disputed CNBC’s position on Nielsen and out-of-home viewing in a recent interview with BuzzFeed.

“If you don’t like the score of the game, sometimes you try to change the referee. We all have out-of-home viewership. I know that’s not getting rated, but I’m glad we’re on,” Schreier said earlier this month.

Among recent major financial news stories, the Dow Jones industrial average topped 21,000 points for the first time in history earlier this month only to suffer a nine-day losing streak, the longest such streak since 1978.