He might have an invested stake in late-night TV enterprise, but Jimmy Kimmel doesn’t believe CBS and Paramount’s reason for canceling The Late Show With Stephen Colbert was “a purely financial decision.” The Late Show remains the format’s most popular program, and, in fact, makes lots of money, according to Kimmel. Speaking to Variety, Kimmel calls reports that Colbert’s show was losing $40 million a year “beyond nonsensical.” How does he know? He makes one of these. Apparently, “these alleged insiders” analyzing budgets don’t know what they’re talking about, Kimmel argues. For one thing, they focus solely on advertising and ignore affiliate fees. Affiliate fees, or carriage fees, generate hundreds of millions of dollars—”probably in total billions”—from stations around the country. Those station affiliates cannot produce as much programming as NBC, so they pay the network for programming, which includes late-night shows. “You must allocate a certain percentage of those fees to late-night shows,” he continues. “It really is surprising how little the media seems to know about how the media works. There’s just not a snowball’s chance in hell that that’s anywhere near accurate.”

Apparently, Kimmel has more optimism toward late-night viability than, say, TV-personality-turned-podcaster Conan O’Brien. Still, he admits that there’s “no question” of network TV’s decline, but “more people are watching late-night TV than ever. I include Johnny Carson in that. People may find that shocking.” Okay, let’s hear him out.

According to Kimmel, at Carson’s peak, The Tonight Show averaged around 9 million viewers a night with “the lead-in shows getting 30 and 40 million.” Today, it’s more fragmented. People are watching the shows “in different places,” and there are more of them. Until The Late Show debuted, it was essentially just Carson. Today, Seth Meyers pulls 2 million views on “YouTube alone. We’re not even talking about Instagram.” Kimmel’s monologues “get between 2 and 5 million.” Jon Stewart gets 5 million. If you add online views to TV ratings (in Kimmel’s case, an average of about 1.77 million per night) and DVR, you get pretty close to Carson. Anyway, he’s right that people still watch this stuff, including the president, who watches enough of it to be mad at these guys and predict their cancellation all the fucking time.

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