This will make you throw up a little. Even though he lost his Fox News show, Beck is prospering -- thanks to his gullible audience who doesn't understand he's just a morning zoo deejay playing a character.
Viewers pay a monthly subscription fee of up to $9.95 for access to programming that includes Beck’s two-hour daily broadcast, a children’s show and a reality show. More than 300,000 subscribers have already signed up, a number that, as WSJ notes, already exceeds the average audience of many cable channels, including CNBC and Fox Business Network.
However, GBTV’s rate of growth has moderated considerably from its torrid pace of last summer. From June to September 2012, Beck’s subscriber total nearly tripled, going from 80,000 (the number who subscribed to Insider Extreme, GBTV’s predecessor) to 230,000. That it’s added “only” another 70,000 new subscribers since then suggests that the audience of Beck diehards willing to pay for video content not covered by their cable subscriptions isn’t infinite.