FNC Remains No. 1, Posts Year-Over-Year Growth

The newsmagazine "60 Minutes" was not television's most popular program this year, but for the 11th consecutive season it had more people who watched at least once during the year than any other non-sports show on TV.

The Nielsen company's cumulative measurement of programs may not mean much in the business of television, but it's a bragging point at CBS News, according to David Bauder at The Associated Press.

For the purpose of setting advertising rates, the currency of television is Nielsen's estimate of how many people watch a program in a given week. By that measurement, the since-departed ABC sitcom "Roseanne," with an average of 18.7 million viewers on the night an episode debuts, was this past season's champ. With 11.1 million viewers each week, "60 Minutes" was No. 18 on television in that ranking.

But Nielsen estimated that 100.4 million people watched "60 Minutes" at least once during the year. That was second only to NBC's "Sunday Night Football" franchise, whose cumulative viewer figure was 111 million.

NBC's "The Voice" and "This Is Us," and CBS' "The Big Bang Theory" round out the top five rankings in cumulative audience, Nielsen said. Both "This Is Us" and "The Big Bang Theory" also ranked in the past season's top five in terms of popularity of each week's episode, along with ABC's "The Good Doctor."

CBS won last week in primetime, averaging 4.4 million viewers. NBC had 4.2 million, ABC had 3.3 million, Fox had 2.3 million, Ion Television had 1.39 million, Univision had 1.35 million, Telemundo had 1.2 million and the CW had 770,000.

Fox News Channel was the week's most popular cable network, averaging 2.83 million viewers, and had two of the top 20 shows in all of television last week following President Trump's summit in Singapore. MSNBC averaged 1.71 million viewers, HGTV had 1.42 million, USA had 1.23 million and TBS had 1.22 million.

Basic Cable Ranker: Week of June 11 (Total Viewers) on Scribd

Compared to the same week in 2017, FNC was up +24 percent in prime time viewers, and +4 percent in total day viewers, undoubtedly lifted by the U.S.-North Korea summit which took place in Singapore and was heavily covered by Fox News and other cable and broadcast news outlets.ABC's

"World News Tonight" topped the evening newscasts with an average of 7.7 million viewers. NBC's "Nightly News" was second with 7.3 million and the "CBS Evening News" had 5.5 million.