Fox dumping its weekday kids block

Fox dumping its
weekday kids block

Blames ad slump. Affiliates will pick up 2 hours.

By Elizabeth White

   The market for kids programming in recent years has suffered from an increase in inventory paired with a weakening of demand from a consolidation of advertisers.
    At least some of that suffering will be eased by the end of the year.
    Yesterday, Fox announced it is suspending indefinitely its two-hour weekday afternoon kids cartoon block beginning Dec. 31 and returning the time to its affiliates.
    The network cites the economic slowdown as the main reason for the withdrawal of weekday programming.
    Fox was once the No. 1 kids network.
    "What really had the most to do with this was the very soft advertising market," says a Fox spokesman. "This has also been on the affiliates' wish list for a long time."
     Back in January, Fox affiliates persuaded the network to push the children’s block back by an hour, to 2-4 p.m. from 3-5 p.m.
     Some media analysts say that this scheduling change effectively killed the network’s afternoon block by pushing it back to a time in the day when kids are in school.
     "Moving the afternoon block to 2-4 p.m. really hurt them. Fox was no more than 5 to 6 percent of the Monday through Friday share of kids 2-11, and it was on a downward trend," says John Wagner, chief kids negotiator for Starcom Worldwide.
     "Fox’s small percentage will now migrate to other options. The WB is very strong and we anticipate that will get stronger. I can only imagine this will make the WB’s situation better. The eyeballs will go elsewhere, so the money will go elsewhere as well."
    The removal of weekday programming runs against conventional wisdom for kids programming, which says the more hours a network has for kids, the better the network does with kids overall.
    The ability to program more hours has been a big factor in the success of the Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon in the kids market, and Fox’s Saturday lineup could suffer as a result.
    But analysts say Fox’s weekday ratings have dropped so low over the past year that any new decline will be negligible.
    "It will have minimal impact," says Wagner. "The impact has already gone through the system after moving their Monday through Friday to 2-4 p.m. Their Monday through Friday is doing so poorly that there’s not much of a promotional platform anymore to lose."
     Fox retains the right to reclaim the afternoon time for kids programming, but a network spokesperson said that such a move would definitely not occur before next fall, and media insiders think it’s unlikely to ever take place.
    That’s because only one of the reasons for eliminating the afternoon block, the weak ad economy, will go away in the foreseeable future.
    The affiliate stations that fought for control over those two afternoon hours will probably be unwilling to relinquish control again, especially for an over-saturated kids market. And the glut of kids inventory will most likely get worse as the cable universe expands.
    "Their affiliates have wanted out for a long time. There’s not a lot of money out there in spot for kids. As the Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon have risen to dominance, especially Monday through Friday, the local numbers have disappeared and the money has dried up," says Wagner.
     "It would be hard to quantify, but [syndication] is going to be a much more promising situation for the affiliates, even though that market is having its own share of troubles these days."

-Elizabeth White is a staff writer for Media Life.

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