Last night’s broadcast of Countdown on the mothership, NBC, was a major coup for Keith Olbermann and his MSNBC program.
For all the clamoring for attention that goes on amongst the cable news kiddies, they are all fighting for slices of a relatively small pie. The ratings leader, Bill O’Reilly, averages about 2 million viewers a day. The lowest rated network news program (CBS) pulls in over 6 million. So graduating to the network opens millions of doors to a cablecaster.
Olbermann, not surprisingly, benefited from this. The early results show him with 4.1 million viewers. That only earned him a third place finish, behind “60 Minutes” and “America’s Funniest Videos,” but it was good enough to quadruple his average MSNBC audience. What’s more, (and this has to hurt) it is twice what Bill O’Reilly does on an average night.
Lies about Countdown are most assuredly forthcoming from Rupert Murdoch's Republican stooge, O'Liely, any minute now... You can read more at News Corpse about why there is still room for growth in those numbers for KO and Countdown.
This is a good showing for a brand new entry in the time slot. I suspect that the football game shown afterwards may have helped his numbers a little with people tuning in expecting a pre-game show, or just not wanting to miss kick off. I wonder how his numbers compared to the game's numbers?
The key here is to see if he can replicate (or increase) those numbers when he gets slots like that again. Another good measure of how well he did might be if there is a spike, even a little one, on his regular 8 pm (EST) and midnight slots. That might be some of those NBC viewers going out of their way to find his show on MSNBC. I hope that does happen... One of his Special Comments on a prime time network would probably shake a few viewers out of their seats.
Some of you may have missed it but The NewsHole - Countdown's official Blog - live Blogged the event for shits and giggles and without much pre-show hype about that fact.
"We didn't announce it...and it's not that big a deal, but we're going to do a real-time live blog for tonight's show. For all you folks on the West Coast, tune into Countdown AFTER the game for the big show."Go on over and give'em all some well wishes and kudos for their efforts and successes. And since many of you are probably interested in knowing... Here are the "Worst person in the world!" winners for the NBC broadcast:
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