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Fox News will profit from the debate showdown with Trump

Fox News will profit from the debate showdown with Trump

Presidential bomb-thrower Donald Trump thinks he’s hitting Fox News where it counts—in the wallet—by skipping tonight’s seventh Republican presidential debate.

That’s doubtful. Even if ratings for the Trumpless debate slump, as Trump insists they will, Fox sold all its advertising time for the event while Trump was still on the agenda. Those rates (which Fox doesn’t disclose) were based on advertiser demand and the ratings of prior debates, not on developments that occurred 48 hours before showtime. "No rates have changed," Fox said in a statement. "There are no advertisers who backed out."

Prior debates have been ratings blockbusters, allowing the networks hosting them to charge as much as 40 times their advertising rates for normal programming. Here’s a tally of ratings for the debates so far:

Source: News reports
Source: News reports

Note the trend: The strongest numbers were for the earliest debates, when Trump was a novelty rather than the established frontrunner. Same for the Democrats: The highest ratings came in the first debate, when surprise challenger Bernie Sanders was a curiosity viewers wanted to check out for the first time. As the audience got more familiar with all the candidates, ratings trailed off.

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The ratings for the Republican debate two weeks ago were the lowest in the series so far. So it stands to reason that the cost of an ad during tonight’s debate is lower than it was last fall, when advertisers paid as much as $250,000 for 30 seconds of air time. (For comparison: CNN’s normal ad rate is around $10,000 for 30 seconds, while Super Bowl ads—the most expensive of all—will go for about $5 million this year.)

Trump already claims his boycott of the Jan. 28 debate is harming Fox News. “The ‘debate’ tonight will be a total disaster,” he tweeted. “Low ratings with advertisers and advertising rates dropping like a rock.” Thing is, that’s not how it works. Viewership, by definition, can't tank before a show even airs, and advertisers don’t normally bail out of contractual agreements mere hours before airtime.

It’s not even clear the debate’s ratings will be lower without Trump. They could go up, on account of all the publicity the smackdown has already generated. By claiming he has a personal gripe with Fox anchor and debate host Megyn Kelly, Trump has added to the drama of the debate and created a better teaser than Fox could ever have. Will Kelly or one of the other anchors jab at Trump while he’s not there to defend himself? Will the candidates? Or will they try to ignore the elephant not in the room?

On top of that, some people who didn’t even know a debate was scheduled for tonight now do.

Besides, Trump will continue to help Fox News in other ways. He still appears on other Fox News programs, such as Bill O’Reilly’s weeknight show, where he granted an interview the night before his no-show at the debate. And being a Trump target won’t necessarily harm Megyn Kelly or the Fox News brand. After Trump’s first spat with Kelly at the GOP debate last August, the ratings for her 9 p.m. show surged. As Trump and Fox News CEO Roger Ailes both know, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Only bad reactions when you get it.

Rick Newman is the author of Liberty for All: A Manifesto for Reclaiming Financial and Political Freedom. Follow him on Twitter: @rickjnewman.