It’s now just been reported that Chris Wallace is leaving CNN to “explore podcasting”. With the recent new CNN is firing hundreds of employees after going from 13.3 million average viewers in 2016 to… 800k in 2024. Comcast is looking to ditch their dumpster fire MSNBC, CNBC, Oxygen, Sci-Fi, and Bravo networks because they’re probably putting out the same or worse decline as cnn. Peacock, NBCs streaming service has yet to turn a profit. And the icing on the cake? “According to Forbes, there were only three cable networks in 2023 with an average audience above one million viewers, down from five the previous year and down from 19 in 2013.” They’re dying on the vine, their streaming services can’t make money, and they are too useless to even keep around as propaganda rags. With the potential death of the first AAA game publisher on the horizon (Ubisoft) we are seeing largest consequences of “get woke go broke” in our lifetimes.
Update: The Guardian is no longer posting on X, Don Lemon is leaving X, expect more to follow suit. This is just hilarious.
Edit 2: numbers reflect an average from last Wednesday to Friday. That marks a 54% decrease in the network's viewership average in the month of October (1.765 million viewers) as well as a 51% decrease in the network's year-to-date 2024 average (1.655 million viewers). Additionally, on Friday MSNBC saw 636,000 viewers and 61,000 in the demo, making it the network's lowest rated non-holiday night of the year.
I think the problem was that Survivor became a smash hit for CBS in 2000, and every cable and over the air network fell over themselves to try to replicate its success with reality shows of their own. From a business perspective, it also helped that they were dirt cheap to produce and get easy short-term returns on.
Of course, they all had varying degrees of success, and a lot of cable networks that formerly had specific focuses like Speed, TLC, History Channel, MTV, etc. saw much of their audience leave once these programs started proliferating their schedules.
They came the expense of more thoughtful, albeit less Schadenfreude-like programming that people tuned into those networks to get away from, alienating their core audience and only attracting fair-weather viewers that would leave when those shows were no longer the hot trendy thing.
Which brings us to where we're at now: multiple networks with no real focus or core audience desperately trying to throw anything at the wall to see what sticks in order to just barely stay afloat. It's why MTV's schedule is little more than Ridiculousness marathons all day, and History and Discovery Channel pretty much rerun the same shows and episodes all day with very little variety.