It is difficult to imagine that Oprah Winfrey will be doing her last show today. It has been twenty five years since she hit the airwaves and has grown to become a colossal, larger than life figure of the broadcasting industry. She has come to command huge influence on people all over the world. She has made it to all the lists worth their name. She has dropped a place but is second on the Celebrity 100. She is ranked third on the Power Women list.
The global lists also recognize her influence and wealth. The Forbes 400 has ranked her 130. She finds herself on the 420 spot on the list of world’s billionaires. Oprah is also included in the World’s Most Powerful People and is ranked 64 globally. It must have been a very big decision for her to finally wind up the show. No doubt the viewership was dropping in the recent past but she could have corrected that if she wanted to. It has been a memorable journey and Oprah not only connected with her audience all over the world but made the show bigger and better over the years.
The numbers related to her and her show are all large and often record numbers. We would like to highlight some of them here in her honor. Her peak earnings in any 12 months was $315 million which she earned between June1, 2009 to June 1, 2010. Her total earnings over the last ten years is estimated to be $2.5 billion. Her net worth has tripled over the last ten years to $2.7 billion. The largest average viewership of her shows was 9 million recorded in the year 2004-05. Average viewership of her most recent season was recorded as 6.5 million. Oprah wants to strengthen her cable network OWN which currently has a viewership of 294,000. The cost of a 30 second spot on her final show will cost $1 million. And the final number that indicates her popularity and influence is the number of Twitter followers she has is 5.9 million.
Via: blogs.forbes
