• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, November 10, 2008

If Oprah Winfrey brings her long-time syndicated show to cable, it wouldn't be to make money. For one of the richest women in the world, it'll have to be for something else.

Oprah makes nearly $400 million a year from everything she owns -- Harpo Productions, her TV production company, revenues from "Dr. Phil" and "Rachael Ray," O magazine, a stake in XM Sirius, and, of course, "The Oprah Winfrey Show," which draws in the bulk of her money. During a third-quarter earning call, David Zaslav, COO of Discovery Communications, discussing the new Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) cable channel, said that after 2011, when Winfrey's contract expires for her show with ABC TV stations, it was "expected" she would bring her show to OWN, which will be run and funded in large part by Discovery.

This is not new. There is always speculation among industry executives almost every time Winfrey's syndication contract nears its completion that she may call it quits. This isn't to say that Winfrey won't have an on-air presence on her new network -- it just may be for something besides her now-iconic show.

Harpo Productions said while it's true her show's contract end with ABC stations in 2011, nothing has been decided after that.

From a purely financial formula, the move to cable wouldn't make much sense. Winfrey's two-decade-old syndication show gets much higher ratings, higher CPMs, and higher overall revenues than any comparative cable show.

One might argue ESPN's "SportsCenter" show brings in over $1 billion in advertising sales a year -- but this includes multi-versions of the show over multiple hours of programming per day. So, it's hard to make a fair comparison.

Rough estimates are that Winfrey's syndicated show pulls in about $150 million to $200 million in advertising per year, with a similar amount being contributed in the form of total station license fees.

Looking at it another way: There are entire cable networks that don't pull in same total advertising dollars  the "Oprah Winfrey" TV show does by itself in syndication annually.

Even if someone could argue those revenues could be replicated on cable, they are missing an important component: It's what the highly valuable platform of broadcast TV brings for Oprah Winfrey for all her political and philanthropic efforts.

As one syndication executive told me "The real value is not about money. It's about influence, and she has the biggest influence with over the air television."

Here's one example that might put all this into perspective: What's happened to Howard Stern? He's at XM Sirius Radio, making hundreds of million of dollars more than he has ever made while working at CBS. But what's his share of voice these days?