Rush Limbaugh’s Ratings Are In a State Of Complete Collapse

[doxydad]

Bad ratings news is rolling in for Rush Limbaugh as his show has fallen to 22nd in New York and 37th in Los Angeles. Limbaugh’s ratings are in a state of major decline.

Rush Limbaugh’s claim to radio fame has always been that he is a right wing talker who brings big ratings to major markets in blue states, but this isn’t the case anymore. Since he moved to Clear Channel his ratings in the nation’s two largest markets have nosedived. Rush Limbaugh went from having the number one talk show in Los Angeles to falling down to 37th place in the ratings. In New York, Limbaugh has dropped from fifth in the city to 22nd. His audience is now so small in both markets that he is being outdrawn by Spanish language stations and NPR.

I worked in radio (still do, occasionally), and when this bloviating jackass brought up the Sandra Fluke lie, it was the beginning of the end. Problem is, when that ass bag did what he did, the sponsors, the lifeblood of radio, scattered like scared sheep, and the domino effect to all talk radio ( Randi Rhodes, Stephanie Miller, etc...) was devastating. Hold Rush Limpballs responsible for the decline, if not outright death of talk radio.

end of justified rant

http://www.politicususa.com/2014/05/01/rush-limbaughs-ratings-state-complete-collapse.html

[sailfla]

1. His show yesterday

Thats all he talked about..how ratings really dont matter these days.
Now, how many times has this guy bragged about his twenty million dittoheads.
See ya Rush

[Mike Daniels]

14. Just a week prior he was talking about how Colbert was going to damage CBS's ratings

Now ratings apparently don't matter where he's concerned.

Nice to see Rush maintaining the high standard of consistency he's held onto for all these years. (sarcasm).

[Javaman]

27. his ratings (to him) don't matter...

he has is multi-million dollar contract that he knows full well has to be paid off if they want to get rid of him.

so they would rather let it run out and let his ratings go in the toilet then pay him off to go away.

limpballs will get his golden parachute and will move onto something else. I suspect he will start is own political action committee when he's done with radio.

[pscot]

30. I tune in once in a while just to hear him whine

about how picked on he is. Music to my ears.

[calimary]

41. Welcome to DU, sailfla!

Glad you're here! Glad you're here on this thread in particular. Glad EVERYONE who's here on this thread IS here on this thread! You can probably guess how long we've worked on this, and for this. How LONG we've agitated against that damn gas giant. Unfortunately he's been around, and prominent enough, for long enough to do some real and serious damage from coast to coast, infecting the national mindset and bringing out the worst in people who listened to him and believed in him. He made it okay for them to bring their feelings of racism and sexism and wish-we-were-back-in-the-Bronze-Age out of the closet and into the mainstream. He put a human face and a VERY loud voice on it and brought it all into a sense of weird, sick "respectability." He made it okay for you to feel that way, to feel justified for feeling that way, to feel victimized and put-upon for feeling that way, and to feel outraged about that and want to get fired up and push all that onto everyone else and force their backward and sociopathic and anti-social and THOROUGHLY-in-the-minority views on the nation at large.

Too bad his demise will mean the whole damn construct comes crashing down, taking with it what little progressive talk we still have. But then again, he's shitting all over the rest of his cohorts, especially the glenn necks and that-guy-whose-name-rhymes-with-Vanity. THEY'VE been poisoned, too, in the revenue and sponsorship department. So I take some consolation in that. Soon AM talk won't be considered a viable vehicle anymore. The bad guys will just go to the internet, but they won't be mainstream on conventional mainstream radio media anymore, at least.

SEE YA, rush!

[Warpy]

48. As long as billionaire right wing sugar daddies cough up

to keep him on the air, he's right, ratings don't matter. Advertisers don't matter. What matters is the dwindling audience of old white men who tune in every day because he's familiar.

[kelliekat44]

2. Why listen to lies and insanity when you can SEE it on FOX?

[trusty elf]

3. ........

[IMG][/IMG]

[shenmue]

4. So glad

Hope better shows like Stephanie Miller can pick up more sponsors.

[Helen Borg]

5. Imploding pig? ...

[Turbineguy]

6. The feds must be jamming his signal

in Bunkerville.

[kentauros]

7. Ok, that's New York and LA.

What are his ratings in "flyover country" where the majority of his listeners reside? The article doesn't seem to think that's important.

I'm surprised he hasn't gone fully to online radio by now anyway, but greedy wingers aren't known for being all that logical or intelligent.

[thesquanderer]

9. re: "surprised he hasn't gone fully to online radio"

His listeners are stuck in the last century. They don't have internet yet.

[Tom Ripley]

23. ^^^THIS^^^

[kentauros]

34. Or the Intertubes for that matter

[nxylas]

13. My thoughts exactly

Rush's claim to fame has not "always been that he is a right wing talker who brings big ratings to major markets in blue states". It's that he beams the prejudices of those in Red America back at them. To them, he provides an antidote to NY- and LA-centric media, among other things.

[kentauros]

35. And that's why the article struck me as odd,

to focus on the ratings of markets that are notoriously Liberal. I'm really kind of surprised those markets are even the highest, other than because of how many people live in them. I would have figured the highest would have been in the South, including Arizona, Utah, and Idaho, percentage-wise.

[JoeyT]

28. I think it might be career suicide for him to jump to online radio.

A lot of his listeners are going to be rural, which means a lot of them are going to have at best either very slow internet or moderately fast internet with very strict bandwidth caps. The very slow internet won't stream worth a damn, and the fast w/caps won't stream for long before you're cut off for the month.

[kentauros]

33. Yeah, that's true. I didn't think about that.

Well, we can dance and party when he finally meets his broadcast-demise!

[alp227]

39. Well, given all the right wing crap on the Internet,

like The Blaze, Free Republic, Drudge Report, etc. I doubt that keeping radio liars in power is a motivation for right wingers to oppose expanding broadband to rural America, a point i was thinking of making.

[JoeyT]

43. The difference between right wing radio and right wing internet

is that with the radio on Rush or Hannity, it's right wing BS all the time and nothing else. On the internet, stuff intrudes into the bubble and there's really no way to control it.

[alp227]

44. Moderators censor comments, and readers can downvote liberal comments

so the comments are 99.99999% in lockstep with the Breitbart, Blaze, etc. agenda.

[Calista241]

8. Rush

I bet 1/2 his listeners are 100% ideologically opposed to whatever he's spewing.

[joeglow3]

37. EXACTLY

I find myself drawn more to opposing views. It pisses my wife off and she thinks I am sadistic. Maybe I am, but I always want to know what my enemy is thinking.

[calimary]

42. Well, people like you serve the rest of us well.

Last edited Fri May 2, 2014, 08:40 PM - Edit history (1)

You are willing to climb down into the sewer so the rest of us don't have to. Every army needs operatives like that - who are willing to go to the icky, gooey depths. For intelligence purposes, among other constructive reasons. So I for one appreciate the sacrifice you and others like you are willing to make for the sake of the rest of us. It's certainly not something I feel able or willing to do. My husband is kind of one of those. He'll check Pox Noise every so often - because he, too, wants to know what the enemy is doing and saying.

In an army there are many specialists. There are the snipers and sharpshooters, there's the materiel support, there are the commanders, there are the grunts, there are the spies, there are the office clerks, there are the mess hall workers, there are the transport people. There's the rear guard and the infantry that goes busting in first, the bomb diffusers, the communications people, message decoders, and medics.

In OUR "army" here in the progressive movement, those stalwarts who are willing to go and keep an ear on the enemy camp do all the rest of us a great service. They're almost like moles. And we need them! And we need to appreciate what they do and the sacrifices they make, risking their own sanity listening to that bunk so that the rest of us don't have to, but then can still know what was said, what offenses and lies were spread, and - as we've seen and experienced and where we've all been gaining ground lately: who's been sponsoring it all - so we activists in other "divisions of interest," shall we say, can go on offense and deal with that.

[NM_Birder]

47. 60% of the time.....works everytime

[Gothmog]

10. Limbaugh's audience is dying off and is not being replaced

Both Fox News and Limbaugh have very old audiences. These audiences are slowly dying off and are not being replaced. This decline will also affect Fox News. Young people are not watching Fox or listening to Limbaugh and so their audiences are declining

[kracer20]

11. You can always find Rush or Hannity on AM

I can drive through the most remote parts of ND, and I could almost guarantee I can find the RW talkers on the dial with a clear signal. Many times on multiple stations. Sometimes they are the only ones I can tune in reliably.

[hibbing]

17. blowtorches

The local A.M. here is right wing talk from 9 in the morning until midnight. Laura, Rush, Hannity, Levin, the list goes on and on and on. I too notice when traveling that is often the only stations you can pick up..blech.

Peace

[liberalhistorian]

19. That's the way it is in

Indiana whenever I drive through it. Harder than hell to find the NPR stations, but every other station has goddamned Rush, Beck, and all the other assorted bloviating, foaming-at-the-mouth RW idiots. Funny thing is that that isn't the case here in South Dakota.

[Comrade Grumpy]

36. I dunno. WNAX in Yankton has Limbaugh wannabes.

And they're always giving that idiotic Rep. Steve King (R-IA) a platform to talk shit.

[liberalhistorian]

49. Oh, dear. Then I'm sure glad

I've never found that station!

[alp227]

40. Hey I live in a major city and can pick up Rush from remote stations.

At one point I was able to pick up Rush on FOUR stations (the local San Francisco affiliate KSFO and then AM affiliates out of KMJ Fresno, KFBK Sacramento, and KSCO Monterey). But thankfully Rush moved to an FM station in Fresno, so I'm down to three Rush stations (another SF station KNEW and then KFBK and KSCO).

I can hear Hannity from three stations too (KNEW, KSTE Sac, KION Monterey).

And Mark Levin live on the local SF affiliate KSFO and then delayed on stations out of L.A. KABC, San Diego KFMB, Reno KKOH, Bakersfield KERN, and Fresno KMJ after sunset.

[edhopper]

12. He never had the amount of listeners he said

Radio ratings are complex and don't count separate discreet listeners. The same listener on diferent days, or a car vs home can be counted multiple times.

[titaniumsalute]

15. Actually that is incorrect

Ratings do count individual listeners. The formula for creating an Average Quarter Hour rating (AQH rating) is counting up all listeners (the cume audience which is not a duplicated number) and then applying a time element to each listener called a Time Spent Listening number (TSL).

If someone listeners to Rush once in a week for only five minutes they are counted as one listener. Same as another listener might listen to 3 hours daily. Still counted as one listener. However the first listener only gave one quarter hour of listening while the other gave 60 quarter hours of listening (Rush's show is 5 days and 3 hours per day totaling 60 quarter hours.)

Those two listeners would have their time spent listening averaged together and overall would produce the rating.

A good analogy I used with my clients is think of a college football stadium. They have and sell 80,000 for the game. At a sellout the stadium has 80,000 people at the game. (Cume audience of a radio show.) But logically not every person is in every seat during the game. The first quarter of the game maybe 62,000 people are in their seat, the second quarter maybe 75,000, the third quarter maybe 77,000 and the fourth quarter maybe 61,000. Most likely, at some point, each seat had been filled for a total audience of 80,000 for the game. But at any given time there were, on average during the game, 68,750 in their seats.

[edhopper]

22. Yes, that's right

it's been a while since I read up on this.
I remembered incorrectly, but the point remains.
A lot of people who might have him on in the car for 5 minutes while going around the dial didn't give him the followers he boasted about.

[titaniumsalute]

45. Yeah the "cume" audience figure is rather bogus to quote

I worked for Arbitron for ten years so that's why I know all of this. We used to encourage radio ad sales people to not just quote the CUME audience. A radio station might have 100,000 listeners (unduplicated listeners with 5 minutes or more listening) tuning in per week. That doesn't mean that 100,000 listeners will hear the commercial message.

That's why they reported the Average Quarter Hour info to show that if you run a commercial at 1:05pm on average, 11,200 will hear that commercial. I don't know what actual network cume Rush had at his high point. Probably north of 10,000,000 listeners per week.

[ladjf]

16. That's good news for Americans. nt

[aquart]

18. He's been kept alive by billionaire bucks...all wasted.

What else can we get those fools to spend their money on?

[11 Bravo]

20. Hell, is this that "exploding whales" thing I've been hearing so much about?

Silly me, I thought they were talking about actual cetaceans!

[Initech]

21. To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld:

"Getting Rush Limbaugh off the air is like stealing from a vending machine. You don't achieve success the first time. You have to rock it back and forth a few times, then it goes over."

[Silent3]

24. Even better news is that the whole genre of right wing talk radio is in decline.

If this were just a matter of shifting popularity among different hateful blowhards, it wouldn't be much of a real gain to see Rush go down, no matter how satisfying that might be in and of itself.

I'd be happier if the audience were shifting to something other than sports blather, but if that's the best we can get, I'll take it.

[edhopper]

25. Why the hell

is this asshole on Armed Forces Radio?

[liberal N proud]

26. There will only be victory when he is off the air

[Thinkingabout]

29. Great, good for him, now let him brag.

[ismnotwasm]

31. Good. Took way too long

[libodem]

32. Operation Chaos Karma

Turn about is fair play.

[Jenoch]

38. Sure, Limbaugh's ratings are down, especially in LA.

In Los Angeles his program was moved to an obscure
AM signal that was previously liberal talk. It's difficult to get listeners to follow to another signal.

I don't get the 5th to 22nd in New York thing. In January, WABC was 20th in the ratings while WOR was 23rd. WOR is now 22nd. That would appear that Limbaugh helped their ratings.

I'm no fan of Limbaugh and I am not a listener. His ratings are obviously down and he has lost a lot of sponsors. However, he still has more than 14 million listeners each week.

Talk radio is dying. Radio in general has fewer listeners than it once did. It still has people listening in their cars.

The national television networks have a fraction of the viewers they once did before the proliferation of cable and satellite TV. Technology has a way of changing people's daily habits.

[Whisp]

46. He has his millions and fed his lies for so long to so many

I don't think he would be too upset.

His work is done and he got paid well.

What a pustule on humanity's buttocks.