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Given the moribund TV station trading market and FCC resistance to any further significant industry consolidation, it comes as no surprise that this year’s TVNewsCheck Top 30 TV station group looks like last year’s, except for a few minor changes. (Scripps moved up one position to No. 9 and Bonneville bumped out Manship to claim the No. 30 spot.)
In the ranking by 2023 revenue, Nexstar once again was at the top ($4.8 billion) with Gray ($3.1 billion), Tegna ($2.9 billion), Sinclair ($2.7 billion) and Fox ($2.5 billion) bunched far behind and rounding out the top five.
The Big 3 — CBS, NBC and ABC — aren’t that big anymore, coming in sixth, seventh and eighth, respectively.
For five publicly traded companies on the chart that break out their TV broadcasting financials — Nexstar, Gray, Tegna, Sinclair and E.W. Scripps — the chart drew revenue and home coverage figures straight out of their annual reports.
For the other 25 groups, the chart relied on revenue and coverage estimates from BIA Advisory Services, a Chantilly, Va.-based research and investment firm.
In all, the Top 30 account for $28.9 billion in revenue, most of the industry’s entire revenue.
BIA tracks station group ownership and uses information from individual stations and markets — in addition to historical data — to generate its ad revenue estimates. Its retransmission consent estimates are derived by modeling the revenue of public companies and other public information.
Actual coverage is the percentage of the estimated 125 million TV