If CNBC's intention when moving its Squawk Box crew from Englewood Cliffs in NJ to the Rock Center in Manhattan, not to mention hiring Andrew Ross Sorkin four years years ago (there has been a 23% decline in total viewership since then) was to boost the popularity of the sagging flagship program which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, it failed.
Yet where CNBC won, is in the irony department, because while its ratings had sunk so law at the end of 2014 that - as we first reported [10] - CNBC was forced to ask Nielsen to "stop" counting its viewers, in the past several month Squawk Box's viewership had experienced a renaissance of sorts. Why? For the same reason CNBC's viewers had all but disappeared: the recent surge in volatility as a result of the first market correction since 2011, following the most artificial, laughable and central-bank orceshtrated rally in history.
Ironic, because it is precisely CNBC's constant cheerleading of what little viewers it had left that pushed the market to such nosebleed levels that on August 24 it suffered its second flash crash in just five years.
It is even more ironic, because instead of a rational, objective coverage of the newsflow, the constant stream of cherry-picked, "double-seasonally adjusted" good news is precisely why viewers had left the Comcast cable station in droves, realizing the disconnect between the economy and stocks is simply too ridiculous to stomach, and that they are being lied to with every instance of the "BTFD" dogma.
As a result, it wasn't until the much dreaded market crash that viewers finally came back. At least some of them.
The same pattern is visible when looking at the entire CNBC viewership, for both the 25-54 demographic and total audiences. Still, for what many - and certainly google trends [12]- said was the most dramatic crash since 2008, the recent rebound is simply far too little, and certainly too late.
In any event, now that CNBC's advertisers have seen it can be done, don't be surprised if suddenly the channel's "cautiously optimistic" tone undergoes a dramatic transformation for the more objective and/or nuanced. After all, in a day and age when "apps are the next big thing on TV", suddenly every CNBC anchor is expendable unless revenue quotas are met.


