You must be correct.
I found ad rates of ~$5 per 1,000 people for TV.
That makes an audience of 100,000 people worth $500. Cable averages 16 minutes of advertising per hour, so MSNBC is grossing ~$8000 per night on Madcow, $40k per week, $2,080,000 per year.
Maybe that seems like a lot, but what what is their overhead? Madcow’s salary alone is $6 million per year. My guess is that they are losing over $8 million per year on that show.
Interesting figures.
But, one has to add in the fees MSNBC gets from cable/satellite, too.
[Several years ago I saw a list of the amounts providers pay monthly for each cable/satellite channel. The more popular channels had much higher rates than the lower-viewership channels. They ranged from $6.00 for ESPN down to $0.72 for TBS to $0.06 for Hallmark. Median cost per channel is $0.14. After a quick google search, I could not find a current list of most channels.]