With Fox News so loud and boastful, never failing to let everyone know it’s No. 1 in cable news, one would just assume the launch of the Fox Business Network, set for next Monday, would be a bang-up affair, with lots of chest-pounding.
Not so. The new business network is being birthed with nary a peep, and network executives are saying little about what Fox Business Network will be. It's not clear they really know.
For Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, that's as it ought to be. Analysts say he’ll keep the network under the radar for a year or more to tinker with its lineup, working to find its identity, while building its subscriber base from an initial 30 million homes and beefing up its online presence with Foxbusiness.com, which quietly debuted last week.
That's exactly how Fox News launched in 1996. The network spent several years quietly honing its identity before challenging CNN. Indeed, at the time the thought was that it would be MSNBC, not Fox, that would challenge and then surpass CNN.
Analysts believe the Ailes strategy is a smart one.
“I think they watched a number of big openings, the best example being the drum roll for Katie Couric, that turned out was effective hype to get people to tune in but set it up for failure,” says Bob Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.
“This is the opposite and is kind of like Fox News, which just got out there and started fiddling and moving things around. It’s like playing New Haven before you open in New York City. The only way to do that here is to not make a big fuss about it.”
But also working to its advantage is that the new network is under a lot less pressure to generate ratings. CNBC, the only major ad-supported business network, doesn't have large viewer numbers, and in fact a lot of its audience isn’t even counted by Nielsen Media Research, typically Wall Street brokers and analysts and institutional investors watching from their offices.
CNBC has long sold itself based on those affluent demographics, not ratings, and Fox Business Network will pursue that same strategy, which will mean focusing heavily on creating the right mix of editorial quality to attract those viewers as well.
CNBC, which has more than 90 million subscribers, generated more revenue on the back of its upscale audience than networks like MSNBC that have bigger ratings. In 2006, CNBC generated $255 million compared to MSNBC’s $166 million, according to TNS Media Intelligence.
Yet CNBC’s audience is relatively small. Its average 25-54 audience in August was 73,000 on an all-day basis, up 40 percent from the same month in 2006, according to Nielsen. By comparison, MSNBC had 138,000 viewers.
Fox Business says it has a slightly different strategy than CNBC, although Ailes has given out few specifics, including what role The Wall Street Journal, which News Corp. acquired in August, will play in providing editorial content.
Ailes has publicly said Fox Business will have a broader target audience than CNBC, which focuses heavily on seasoned investors.
But while it may venture toward that goal, it’s not likely to stick, says Andrew Tyndall of the TV-news-focused Tyndall Report.
“That’s what CNNfn did to compete with CNBC and it didn’t work,” he says. “Even if you did build up an audience interested in consumer finance, they’re not rich, so the whole point of having the channel disintegrates.”
Fox Business may take years to overtake CNBC as the No. 1 business network, but an earlier battle may play out online.
CNBC re-launched its web site last December, notably with more video, but still ranks far below other financial sites. It ranked No. 27 among these sites in August with 478,000 unique visitors, up nearly 300 percent from the year-earlier period, according to comScore.
Still, its online audience is a fraction the size of top sites like Yahoo! Finance, MSN Money and Dow Jones.
“This may be the way in which News Corp. ends up beating CNBC, with the Dow Jones brand, rather than with the Fox Business Network,” says Tyndall.
