Will Matt Lauer Be Missed? Not If His Q Score Is Any Indication (Exclusive)

“Today” show host isn’t exactly Robin Roberts in eyes of the public

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Today, Matt Lauer was fired from “Today” following a “detailed complaint” about “inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace.” As anchor of the morning show for 20 years, it will sure be weird for viewers to flip to NBC and not see Lauer’s face. But will they miss him? Not that much, according to Lauer’s Q Score.

As of September 2017, Lauer had a Positive Q Score of 11, according to the eponymous market-research company that measures a celebrity’s likability. That’s a full six points below the average for a host, and is generally not great.

Some context: Lauer’s rating means of the large percentage of people who recognized him on the Q Scores Company’s survey, just 11 percent said he was among their favorite public personalities. Conversely, his Negative Q Score of 25 is four points above the national average. That’s not the direction one wants to go on that one.

There’s a bit of a silver lining here for the newly unemployed anchor. Lame as his current Q rating may be, it is still up from the public’s perception of Lauer just a couple of years ago. Back in 2014, when TheWrap first teamed up with the Q Scores Company on a study of broadcast network morning show personalities, our findings were even less-flattering for Savannah Guthrie’s now-former partner.

At the time, Lauer had a paltry 7 Positive Q Score, edging only co-workers Carson Daly (a 6) and Kathie Lee Gifford (5) in a study of 16 morning TV jocks.

Since then, Lauer’s main mark has fluctuated between a 9 and an 11. The Q Scores Company will next measure Matt & Co. in January, so we can only imagine how low he’ll go then. (Can a Positive Q Score go negative?)

Need more spin the situation? Lauer’s recent 56 Familiarity Score is way higher than the industry’s average of 35.

Weirdly, the less-known Lauer is, the more he’s liked. In 2014, Lauer’s recognizability ranking was a whopping 65, which was behind only Gifford (76) among their peers.

In other words, participants in the three-years-ago larger-scale poll sure knew those two, and they sure didn’t like them very much. On the plus side, they’ve only got to watch one of them between 7 and 11 a.m. nowadays.

For fun, here’s how that chart looked back in 2014:

Morning Show Host Q Scores

Readers will notice Charlie Rose was relatively high up there back then. Unfortunately, accusations of that guy’s own sexual misconduct claimed the “CBS This Morning” anchor last week.

Yes, all of this is making George Stephanopoulos look pretttttty good.

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