Oxygen, the women's cable network founded by former Viacom and Disney exec Geraldine Laybourne a year ago, received minuscule ratings during the last quarter of 2000, according to figures released by Nielsen Media Research Monday.

Although available in more than 12 million homes, Oxygen was watched in an average of just 1,000-8,000, depending on the time of day, according to the Nielsen figures. "It's terribly disappointing," one unnamed ad exec told today's online edition of Electronic Media. "Maybe they aren't presenting programming women really need." But Laybourne questioned the reliability of the numbers, telling EM: ""To me, this is ridiculous. Everyone knows that the Nielsen data for networks under 20 million is unreliable. We haven't subscribed to Nielsen yet, because the numbers they have for us don't have any validity."

Source: Studio Briefing