So what is his audience? He claims 15 to 20 million based on many years ago. But that has NEVER been proven. Read this
Cenk Uygur: A Challenge to Rush: Prove Your Ratings
LEt us say that Limbaugh has five million people per day who listen to him and most of those are regular listeners. And let us say that there might be as high as a 50% addition on any other day. So that might give him 7 to 8 million different people each week.
Flip that coin. Over 300 million American never listen to him.
If seven million different people had purchased tickets to STAR WARS or LORD OF THE RINGS or HUNGER GAMES, it would be a major flop of HEAVEN'S GATE proportions.
Limbaugh survives because he is in a cheap medium that has a niche audience which is loyal. I would love to see a demographic breakdown on who listens to him and I would be willing to bet they skew very white - much older, more non urban and hardly in the so called "desired demographic" that advertisers love.
"His genre" is basically a very marginal niche at best.
You can whine and complain and speculate all you want in an effort to diminish Rush's success, but you won't change a single fact:
Arbitron is the standard for radio ratings across the nation and it has put Rush at #1 in ALL major and medium sized markets in more than 600 stations across the nation.
Rush commands and gets the prime midday window for radio listening in every single one of those markets. They don't meet Rush's requirements, they don't get his program.
They are delighted to accommodate his requirements because almost every single station, no matter what its format or genre, who carries the Rush Limbaugh Program moves into the #1 slot in their market no matter where they started. It happened here in Albuquerque. It happened in Amarillo. It has happened time and again across the country.
Rush paved the way to put talk radio on the format and make it the most popular genre of radio. And because he plowed that field, it has provided opportunity for many hundreds, maybe thousands, of others to enter that genre as talk show hosts and facilitators. And even with all those others, some of them brilliant, entering the field, it has diluted his ratings a bit because there are only so many listeners to go around, but he has never lost his #1 rating.
And he has maintained that rating for more than 25 years which is nothing short of amazing.
Hate him if you want to. Join the chorus of haters who can't stand that he is successful and desperately want him to be unsuccessful. Who are willing to join all the dishonest stupid stuff that is said about him and believe those who claim he is failing or never was successful in the first place. Who want to diminish him, minimalize him, negate him.
But the facts speak for themselves. Love him or hate him, appreciate him or not, enjoy his style or don't, appreciate his content or not, you cannot take a track record like that away from him.