• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, April 8, 2011

 Two point two million viewers and you can't get any advertising support? Is that what happen to Glenn Beck? Three years and out?

It sure seemed Beck had the perfect and complete backing of Roger Ailes, chairman of Fox News Channel. Yeah, we know about scores of advertisers who abandoned the show. But we know they all didn't leave the network.

In an increasingly micro-targeted media world, Beck's show was immensely big -- many times the size of other cable TV news shows. It would seem that in a fractionalized media world, all kinds of niche content can survive. Digital video business seemingly can work with fewer visitors. But with Beck, we now know traditional media rules sometimes do apply.

"Fox saw that he was bad for business," said David Brock, founder/CEO of Media Matters of America, on MSNBC's "Hardball with Chris Matthews."

Some reports say some 300 to 400 advertisers were lost on Beck's show. But that's over-reaching. Few news reports know the exact media planning/buying moves of each TV marketer's media plan on the Fox News Channel. Typically, those TV advertisers are in variety of different Fox News shows -- a run-of-schedule plan that doesn't put the same advertisers into the same shows every day. Two million viewers is a big number -- more than virtually all cable news shows. But remember, two million viewers amount to less than 1% of all U.S. TV viewers. For cable TV however - afternoon cable TV, for that matter -- it's big, though tiny for many broadcast networks/distributors.

Beck had has success doing a number of digital video offerings -- where fans could go and pay for his content. Along with his radio show -- maybe a satellite radio show -- perhaps this is the way to go for the future. For many in the increasing fractional media world, this is the right plan -- get consumers to pay where advertisers won't or can't.

One would think in a world where the likes of Google seem to promise traditional TV/cable networks new kinds of video advertisers for their hard-to-sell programming, Fox News could have figured out another financial formula.

All to say, while we see many TV/video advertising financial connections changing, much remains the same no matter the relative popularity scale when it comes to one's point of view.