Viewers are people who watch a program. If the ENTIRE consumer base was limited to just the audience then viewer and consumer are the same group. But if your consumer base includes non-viewers then the consumer market is larger than the viewership.
You can alienate consumers who never watch the show.
If they don’t watch the show how the hell could you alienate them…unless they are dumb sheep that do what they are told.
If that were true, MAGA consumers would would have flexed that muscle long ago. This has nothing to do with viewers or consumers, and everything to do with Trump’s FCC threatening networks.
This is a direct result of recent offensive statements that kimmel and Colbert made. it wasn’t long ago. And it’s not MAGA. It’s Republicans and they represent a sizeable consumer base.
This is why Democrats left the party and put Trump in office. The party is tone-deaf and will argue a hole to China instead of looking at the obvious.
Aren’t the shows less lucrative than when there were centrist hosts like Leno and Carson?
But if this is about whether firing Fallon and Myers would be either censorship or self-censorship, yes it would be one of those. Sinclair and NexStar are listening to Trump and Carr.
What exactly did Kimmel say that caused this to happen?
All broadcast shows are less lucrative that in the olden days, because audiences have more options.
Yes, but I don’t think that you can pin it primarily on the fact that hosts like Colbert, Kimmel, and Meyers are “non-centrist” – it’s mostly a function of of the fact that viewing of “linear” (traditional broadcast and cable) TV in general is down substantially from even Leno’s era, much less Carson’s, and late-night shows are doing particularly poorly in that regard, especially among viewers under age 40.
The job requires comedic skills which very few Trumpers possess.
Also, Fox News claims that their Greg Gutfeld does something similar and gets better ratings. Is that true?
Yup. Though, to also be fair, he’s on earlier in the evening than the other guys: his show airs at 10pm ET, while the other three are on 95 minutes later (11:35pm ET). So, Gutfeld is technically in a prime-time slot, while the others are in a late-night slot.
Q2 2025 average audience size:
So, conservative latenight draws 3 million, and liberal latenight draws 5 million? Is that the point you were trying to make?
The point I was making is that, yes, Gutfeld does actually get substantially better ratings than any other single late-night talk-show host.
Now, arguably, if you consider Colbert, Kimmel, and Fallon to be “splitting” the “liberal latenight” audience, you could say that “liberal latenight” outdraws “conservative latenight,” I guess.
Advertisers should be alarmed, because those eyeballs aren’t moving over to Gutfeld. They’re a lost opportunity.
Advertisers were likely already alarmed about all three of those network shows for years now, because their audiences have been shrinking for years, and are generally old.
What is likely to happen is that all three of the networks are going to replace Colbert, Kimmel, and Fallon with repeats of their prime-time shows, or low-cost-to-make game shows; the three late-night hosts have/had very large contracts (all three of them are getting about $15 million a year, plus the cost of their large production crews), and it’s likely that the networks have been losing money on them, given the poor ratings (and commensurate poor ad revenues).
Yeah, they’re so alarmed, they kept spending millions of dollars buying ad time.
They are buying ad time, but as those shows’ ratings decline – and they have been declining for years – the amount that the networks are making from those ad sales goes down. The cost for a 30-second spot on a network show is driven by the number of people viewing it, and the demographics of those viewers; neither of those variables are working in the favor of the current late-night network TV talk shows.
(You do know that I work in advertising, yes?)
What about John Oliver? He has to be in the cross-hairs of the fragile snowflakes on the right as well. Can’t we get a safe space for all of them where no one says mean stuff?
By the way, this is the same Sinclair group that showed it’s cartoon villainy by having all the news outlets they own participate in a scripted “heartfelt piece” back in 2018, I believe. They were instructed on what exactly to say, how exactly to say it, at what specific pace to say it, what to wear while saying it, and at what point during the evening (definitely not late night!) news to say it. You can find the videos on YouTube, and it almost sounds like they were all gathered together to read it from cue cards.
He’s on HBO, which is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery; I have no doubt that that parent company is going to be pressured, too.
That’s why advertisers keeping buying time, no? I presume they can do math, and as sales go down from latenight ads, they pay less for those ads. The cost per sale stays relatively the same, no? The networks have more to worry about than advertisers. Unless those eyeballs go away entirely…
But what do I know, you’re the ad guy.