Major brands like Netflix, Amazon and J.P. Morgan Chase have started airing commercial spots against daytime news shows and prime-time commentary programs on the Fox News Channel in the weeks since the November 2024 election.
The advertisers are attracted to the channel’s politically-diverse audience and higher ratings in the post-election period, according to a report from the Financial Times on Thursday.
While most cable news channels suffer from an immediate drop in total day and prime-time ratings, Fox News has not only retained its core audience of right-of-center viewers, but attracted progressive viewers who want to follow the daily activities of the Trump administration — and see how the network covers it, accordingly.
Fox News has not shied from reporting on some of the more-controversial activities to rise from the Trump administration in the weeks since he took office — from the Signal text message scandal that embroiled former Fox News host-turned-U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to the antics of Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), among other matters.
Officials have Fox News have long said that the network’s audience is more politically diverse than its reputation might suggest. Now, there’s proof in the numbers, with Fox News attracting 50 percent more viewers in the first three months of 2025 compared with the prior year— an unusual audience increase that comes at a time when more households are dropping their cable and satellite TV plans.
Advertisers have taken note. Many blue-chip companies who want to reach the biggest audience possible have come around to the idea that Fox News is one of the best places on the cable dial to reach current and prospective consumers.
“The landscape has changed dramatically — in today’s fragmented landscape, this audience is hard to ignore,” Jeff Collins, the President of Advertising Sales at Fox Corporation, the parent company of Fox News Media, which operates the Fox News Channel, told the FT in an interview.
During the Biden administration, it was a little easier to ignore the Fox News audience, in part because of the opinions expressed by some of its prime-time hosts. Notably, Tucker Carlson was on a so-called “no air” list compiled by some top brands and ad agencies, with marketers feeling his controversial views were too nuclear to advertise against, the FT said, citing a person familiar with the matter.
Carlson’s program was the highest-rated in cable news when he was fired two years ago. (Officially, the network says it “parted ways” with the host; sources told The Desk he was terminated, and that Carlson was “totally unaware” he was about to be dismissed.) The loss of Carlson’s show resulted in a slight dip in the prime-time ratings, but the network quickly rebounded with a similar program hosted by Jesse Watters, which has managed to attract strong overall and key demographic ratings as Carlson’s program did, but without the controversy attached to it.
It isn’t just news and prime-time programming that has viewers tuning in. Earlier this month, Fox News was one of several channels to air President Donald Trump’s prime-time address to Congress. Fox News had the highest overall viewership of any television network — broadcast or cable — with nearly 11 million American households tuning in to watch some or all of the speech, according to Nielsen ratings reviewed by The Desk. ABC came in second place overall with 6.33 million viewers, while CNN was second in the cable network race with 1.93 million viewers. Collins said 60 percent of viewers who identify as Democrat tuned in to watch Trump’s speech on Fox News, though Collins and the FT did not say how the network determined this.
