The Most Dominant Local TV News Stations in America

August Power Rankings

Since Share Rocket first introduced its social ratings solution, this revolutionary approach to measuring local audience behavior has always highlighted notable outliers in the data.

Share Rocket’s social ratings and performance measurement platform is used by the largest broadcast ownership groups and their stations to effectively benchmark and rank their station’s performance against the competitors in their markets. Typically, the larger the market, the more competitive that market is in terms of social SHARE. Generally, in those markets where more than four stations compete, the top performing station can win a time period with a 30 SHARE, and sometimes with even less.

As we look across all of the television markets, we see interesting competitive dynamics playing out in the mid-market and small-market arenas. It is with this goal in mind that we introduce a new power ranking, showing the most dominant local TV news stations in America.

What does dominance look like? Quite simply, it ranks the stations that have the largest social SHARE scores in their given market — the stations that have the largest lead over their next closest competitor. Without factoring size or the competitiveness of the competitors, it doesn’t necessarily seek to rank the best station overall. We ranked the Top 20 stations (21 this month due to a tie) by calculating the largest lead over their nearest competitor.

Below is our Top 20 Power Ranking, but first, some notes:

– The most dominant station in America was WNEP (ABC) in Scranton, with an incredible 91 SHARE (compared to its 2 other competitors making up just 9% of the market). WNEP also had 7 of the top 8 overall social assets in the market (including stations, sub-brands and individuals). Scranton’s top individual was WNEP’s Joe Snedeker.

– We put an asterisk by the one station with only one other competitor, KSBW (NBC) in Monterey. Most of the stations had 2 competitors in their market. But if you look at the top markets with three or more competitors, showing a more competitive market, WILX (NBC) in Lansing would be the top in that category, followed by WHIO (CBS) in Dayton.

– Of the top 20 most dominant stations, the station in the largest DMA (showing dominance in a big market) is WTVT (FOX) in Tampa, which is the 11th largest DMA, followed by WJBK (FOX) in Detroit, which is the 13th largest DMA.

* — KSBW (NBC) has just one other station as a competitor in the Monterey market.

– This ranks stations based on the past 30 days of data, ending August 12.