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Fox News has attracted 125 new blue-chip advertisers since the US election, as Rupert Murdoch’s cable television channel commands soaring audiences during Donald Trump’s second presidency.
Companies including Amazon, GE Vernova, JPMorgan Chase, Netflix and UBS have recently aired advertisements on Fox News for the first time in at least two years.
“Historically, after an election, networks will see ratings dips. When we saw an acceleration in ratings, we saw new advertisers coming in,” Jeff Collins, Fox Corp’s president of ad sales, said in an interview.
The influx of advertisers is a departure from the first Trump administration, when some brands avoided the network’s more controversial programming amid consumer backlash.
In 2018, former Fox host Tucker Carlson’s on-air comments about immigrants making the US “poorer and dirtier” spurred big brands such as T-Mobile to pull ads from his programme.
Fox executives say the network is partly benefiting from a decline in the wider traditional television universe. As audiences have shifted online, Fox News is among the few remaining places where brands can reach millions of viewers at once.
“The landscape has changed dramatically,” Collins said. “In today’s fragmented landscape, this audience is hard to ignore.”
Fox chief executive Lachlan Murdoch noted the phenomenon at an investor conference earlier this month.
“Because of the election results, many advertisers have sort of rethought their positioning in this country and understand that the Fox News viewer really does represent middle America — and they’re responding with their cheque books,” he said.
From 2018 through 2020, some advertisers had a “no air” list of Fox News programmes they wanted to avoid, according to a person close to the company. These tended to be opinion shows, such as Tucker Carlson’s nightly programme, the person added.
Consumer goods company Procter & Gamble, one of the largest advertisers in the US, stopped running ads during Carlson’s nightly show but returned to that slot in 2023 after he was ousted from Fox. P&G said its ads appear on a wide range of media that deliver a breadth of content.
“We constantly monitor advertising placement to ensure the media companies from which we buy ads meet these standards and address any potential issues directly with the appropriate parties,” the company said.
Fox executives say their audience is politically diverse. Collins said, for example, 60 per cent of Democrats that watched Trump’s March address to Congress on cable news viewed it on Fox News. “That has gone a huge way in getting advertisers back into hours that they didn’t previously run in,” he said.
High-profile Fox interviews such as those with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have also attracted advertisers.
“It has become this virtuous cycle where we get the best interviews, that’s fuelling larger audience growth,” Collins said.
As television audiences elsewhere have shrunk, Fox News has swallowed up other networks, taking up 70 per cent of all cable news viewership. The channel has averaged 3mn viewers during the primetime hours of 8pm-11pm this year, up nearly 50 per cent compared with the same period a year ago.
In recent months Fox News has even rivalled broadcast television, which traditionally attracts larger audiences because it is free to watch. From Trump’s inauguration on January 20 up to March 10, Fox News drew 4mn viewers during primetime hours, beating CBS’s 3.9mn and NBC’s 3.4mn.
The Murdoch-owned channel “supplies massive, cost-effective [audience] reach, which remains TV advertisers’ primary goal”, said Forrester senior analyst Nikhil Lai.
Brian Wieser, a top advertising analyst, believes brands are warming up to Fox as part of a broader cultural and political shift in corporate America.
“To be blunt, not enough people care about the same issues they cared about in the past. There were advertisers who didn’t necessarily believe in the reasons why they should stay away from that kind of content, but they knew that it would be bad for their business. Nobody wanted a potential boycott,” Wieser said.
Lachlan Murdoch told investors this month: “The election and the election results have validated Fox News’s position.”
Amazon and UBS declined to comment. JPMorgan, Netflix and GE Vernova did not respond to requests for comment.
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