All 153 Linear TV Channels Ranked by 2023 Viewership

Whoever said linear television is dying did not tell NBC or Fox News Channel. (Though they would also be right.) In IndieWire’s now-annual ranking of every TV channel by viewers, NBC pretty comfortably came out on top. No fake news here: Fox News was again no. 1 on cable, making it eight years in a row.

For calendar 2022, we ranked all 126 Nielsen-rated basic cable channels. This year, we upped the ante and added broadcast networks and premium TV channels to the mix; overall that’s 153 channels.

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It is no surprise the Top 4 channels of 2023 are the so-called “Big 4” broadcasters: NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox. Even if you stopped watching broadcast television years ago, a lot of (older, primarily) Americans still tune in. The medium is ostensibly free (with an antenna) and the channels are very findable within the bundle. And broadcast nets carry sports, local news, and late-night TV — what more could you want this side of streaming?

Hate or love Fox News for the political leanings of (most of) its on-air personalities, you can’t argue with these results. FNC more than doubles MSNBC’s nightly viewership and more than triples CNN’s. Good luck to you, Mark Thompson.

We should point out here that the Nielsen ranker we’ve used for this story is not inclusive of delayed (mostly DVR) viewing, which disproportionally rewards live news (Fox News, MSNBC, CNN) and sports (like ESPN). See all 153 (non-syndicated, so no PBS, for example) channels ranked by their respective Monday-Sunday 2023 primetime (8-11 p.m.) U.S. viewers below.

And no, we hadn’t previously heard of Grit TV (tagline: Television With Backbone), yet another channel running classic westerns, either. The “Yellowstone” Effect is real — but not quite strong enough for its Paramount Network home to crack the Top 35. It’s better than being at the bottom: bringing up the rear are a pair of Qatar’s beIN Sports channels (one in English and one in Spanish; both average just 3,000 primetime viewers) and the Spanish-language version of HGTV.

Finally, you’ll have to forgive the lackluster stats from HBO, Starz, and Showtime — viewership of premium television programming has shifted hard to streaming. This time next year, there might not even be a linear Showtime channel to include.

For the purposes of getting you this ranking before the holiday, our “2023” data set starts December 26, 2022 and ends December 12, 2023. The final column contains the viewership averages, in thousands. (Add a comma and three zeroes to the end of each: ABC averaged 3,346,000 viewers, Lifetime averaged 379,000, AXS TV averaged 31,000, and so on.)

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