'MNF' scores
big victory for ESPN
Sports network vaults to first in primetime in October
By Toni Fitzgerald
Oct 28, 2009
ESPN owes the NFL a thank-you note.
Driven by record ratings for "Monday Night Football," the network thoroughly dominated the competition in October, finishing first across all the adult demographics and total viewers, as well as boasting the month's top four shows.
That's according to basic cable ratings for October released yesterday by Nielsen.
"MNF" games were the top four finishers among viewers, adults 18-49, 18-34 and 25-54, led by the Minnesota Vikings-Green Bay Packers game that set an all-time cable record with 21.9 million total viewers.
ESPN finished first in primetime easily, rising more than 20 percent across all the major demos. Among total viewers, it averaged 3.73 million, a 500,000 advantage over second-place TBS, which had baseball coverage.
In 18-49s, ESPN averaged 1.88 million, 300,000 ahead of TBS, and in 18-34s the sports network averaged 855,000, 70,000 more than TBS.
Among 25-54s, ESPN averaged nearly 1.9 million, nearly 400,000 better than TBS.
TBS had the remaining six top-10 shows among total viewers, all of them postseason baseball games, but the network was down compared to last October across virtually every demographic thanks to a snoozer National League Championship Series. Last year's seven-game ALCS brought in better ratings.
Among the cable news networks, Fox News Channel continued to rank first among 25-54s, the key news demographic, despite all four networks seeing declines versus last year, during the run-up to the presidential election.
CNN was off the most, 653 percent, plunging to third place, just slightly above HLN, averaging 187,000 viewers. By comparison, Fox News averaged 563,000. Last year only 46,000 viewers separated the two networks.
FX was the only top-10 network besides ESPN to see double-digit growth in primetime among 18-49s, up 10 percent over last year.
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