Al Jazeera America viewing remains minimal

The latest cable news ratings show that Al Jazeera America's (AJAM) news programs are getting minimal viewing.  How minimal? In the latest report, the network's daytime shows garnered a rating of 0 among the key 29-54 age demographic.  (Ratings refer to the percentage of US TVHH watching, and are rounded to a single decimal point, so it doesn't necessarily mean that no one watched.  The ratings services also provide estimates of the number of homes watching, which can be more useful for cable network's hyper-competitive and fragmented audiences).  At this point, the network's ratings are so low that they don't show up in most reports.

Primetime shows did only slightly better.  Consider This, their 10 p.m. also earned a 0 rating, and averaged 9000 viewers total, with only 3000 in the 29-54 demo.  AJAM's flagship program, America Tonight at 9 p.m., averaged 18,600 total viewers, and was one of many shows to record 0 viewers in the 29-54 demo at some point during the week.  To put the AJAM numbers in context, audiences for America Tonight's 9 p.m. competitors on Wednesday night (Oct. 9, 2013) were 542,000 for CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight, 1,445,000 for MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, and 2,475,000 for Fox's The Kelly File.  America Tonight also got outperformed by specialty shows Dr. Drew on Call (CNN Headline), with 257,000, and Secret Lives of the Super Rich (CNBC), with 131,000.

While AJAM is handicapped by the fact that it's channel isn't on all systems and only reaches about half the TVHH of the other cable news networks, the continued poor performance does not bode well for a nominally advertising-financed network; nor does it give the network much of a bargaining position to earn carriage (and licensing fees) from multichannel distributors.

Source - Al Jazeera America Had a Rough Ratings Week; Some Shows Hit Zero in Key Demo,  Mediaite
Cable News Ratings for Wednesday, October 9, 2013,  Zap2it TV by the numbers