CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo this week (
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You’d forgive the folks over at CNBC if, perhaps, just a small piece of them wished for the markets to collapse.
After all, while it has been a record-breaking month for the Dow Jones industrial average — sparking investor cash to start to move back into equities — viewers continue to flee the cable business-news network.
In the latest quarter to date, CNBC viewers in the key 25- to 54-year-old demographic have fallen 3.8 percent from last year’s first quarter, according to Nielsen.
In fact, the number of viewers in the key demographic have fallen by one-third since 2008 — dropping in each of the past four years as the Dow has bulled its way to positive gains over the same period.
To CNBC viewers, it seems nothing is as boring as good markets news.
“They have to figure out how to get people to watch when we’re not in the middle of a financial crisis,” Robert Thompson, a media and pop culture professor at Syracuse University, told The Post.
“A cable channel can’t depend on simply giving people data,” he added.
CNBC averaged 52,000 viewers in the core audience group each day last year, down from 88,000 in 2008 — the last time the network saw a pop in key demo viewers.
Perhaps not surprisingly, that was the year of the Great Recession, when the Dow closed down 33 percent.
In 2012, CNBC lost 13 percent of its core advertiser audience from 2011.
“There doesn’t seem to be as many individual investors relying on them,” said one executive familiar with CNBC. “But they have premium ad rates. Why does it matter if the demo number is lower?”
The network is said to be a cash cow for parent NBCUniversal.
Still, CNBC CEO Mark Hoffman appears to need a big market sell-off or a prolonged period of volatility to increase eyeballs.
While the bottom line is still fat, the slimmed-down audience has Hoffman under pressure, sources said.
The executive has been asked to come up with synergies with NBC News so it can work more closely with its broadcast colleagues, now under the watchful eye of Chairwoman Patricia Fili-Krushel.
Though by all accounts he’s already running a tight financial ship, Hoffman, sources said, gets rankled at times when his staff is asked to work on projects for other NBC News shows.
Fili-Krushel said this week she wants business news chiefs to play nice together.
“If financial performance is the measure, and generally it is with business, we posted our seventh consecutive year of record financial performance in 2012,” said a CNBC spokesman.
That may be true, but net advertising revenue is down 11.2 percent since 2008, according to SNLKagan. A 20.3 percent rise in affiliate revenue — or fees from pay-TV providers — over the same period produced an overall 6 percent bump in revenue.
CNBC also had the highest reach in “affluents among all business media,” the spokesman said.
The network spent big to promote two new primetime reality shows, sources say, and got mixed results.
A 10 p.m. show, “Car Chasers,” saw its rating in the key demo drop 22 percent in its second week but improved slightly on last year’s “60 Minutes” show in the time period.
“Treasure Detectives,” at 9 p.m., did slightly better, boosting demo numbers by 19 percent versus the same period last year.
“The sales team is under huge pressure to sell prime time,” said one cable source.