Report: Trump Media Ambitions Face Obstacles

Donald Trump

People close to the candidate have taken a preliminary look at Donald Trump’s options to create a media business, though there’s no serious effort right now, according to Bloomberg.

Creating a media outlet that could live up to the megawattage Trump has produced this past year on the campaign trail would be a lot harder than it sounds. While Trump has been a major draw for cable news, the most likely post-election scenario is that he would follow the path of former Fox News star Glenn Beck and start an online media venture first, relying on his large base of grassroots supporters to pay monthly subscriptions, media analysts and executives say.

There’s no guarantee pay-TV providers like Comcast Corp. would carry Trump’s channel. In fact, while cable operators typically pay programmers to carry their networks, Trump could have to pay the operators to get on their systems. When Rupert Murdoch started Fox News in the 1990s, he reportedly paid about $300 million to get cable operators to carry the network.

And if pay-TV operators agree to carry Trump’s channel, he’d still need to invest in programming.

“The problem is people want to tune in to Donald Trump,” Ruddy said. “But can Donald be on all the time? You still need to fill it up with programming that would make his audience happy. And that’s where the big costs come in.”

But Trump would run into another problem with advertisers. Several brands have balked at supporting Trump, declining to sponsor the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. They likely wouldn’t buy commercials on Trump’s TV network either.

That’s why an online video channel makes more sense. It’s been tried before, with mixed results. In 2014, Sarah Palin introduced a $10-a-month online TV channel, but shut it down a year later. On the other hand, Beck started TheBlaze online two years ago and got as many as 400,000 subscribers to pay $99.95 a year or $9.95 a month, according to Greenfield.

Beck may have hit a ceiling on subscriptions, though, because some of his conservative followers were older and more comfortable watching a TV channel than an online video service, according to one executive who asked not to be identified discussing his former employer.

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