{"id":80630,"date":"2025-08-19T07:25:06","date_gmt":"2025-08-19T07:25:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/80630\/"},"modified":"2025-08-19T07:25:06","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T07:25:06","slug":"jimmy-kimmel-doesnt-believe-colbert-was-losing-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/80630\/","title":{"rendered":"Jimmy Kimmel doesn’t believe Colbert was losing money"},"content":{"rendered":"

He might have an invested stake in late-night TV enterprise, but Jimmy Kimmel doesn\u2019t believe CBS and Paramount\u2019s reason for canceling The Late Show With Stephen Colbert was \u201ca purely financial decision<\/a>.\u201d The Late Show remains the format\u2019s most popular program, and, in fact, makes lots of money, according to Kimmel. Speaking to Variety<\/a>, Kimmel calls reports that Colbert\u2019s show was losing $40 million a year \u201cbeyond nonsensical.\u201d How does he know? He makes one of these. Apparently, \u201cthese alleged insiders\u201d analyzing budgets don\u2019t know what they\u2019re 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\u2014\u201dprobably in total billions\u201d\u2014from 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. \u201cYou must allocate a certain percentage of those fees to late-night shows,\u201d he continues. \u201cIt really is surprising how little the media seems to know about how the media works. There\u2019s just not a snowball\u2019s chance in hell that that\u2019s anywhere near accurate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Apparently, Kimmel has more optimism toward late-night viability than, say, TV-personality-turned-podcaster Conan O\u2019Brien<\/a>. Still, he admits that there\u2019s \u201cno question\u201d of network TV\u2019s decline, but \u201cmore people are watching late-night TV than ever. I include Johnny Carson in that. People may find that shocking.\u201d Okay, let\u2019s hear him out.<\/p>\n

According to Kimmel, at Carson\u2019s peak, The Tonight Show averaged around 9 million viewers a night with \u201cthe lead-in shows getting 30 and 40 million.\u201d Today, it\u2019s more fragmented. People are watching the shows \u201cin different places,\u201d and there are more of them. Until The Late Show\u00a0debuted, it was essentially just Carson. Today, Seth Meyers pulls 2 million views on \u201cYouTube alone. We\u2019re not even talking about Instagram.\u201d Kimmel\u2019s monologues \u201cget between 2 and 5 million.\u201d Jon Stewart gets 5 million. If you add online views to TV ratings (in Kimmel\u2019s case, an average of about 1.77 million per night<\/a>) and DVR, you get pretty close to Carson. Anyway, he\u2019s 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<\/a> all the fucking time.<\/p>\n

Jimmy Kimmel got Italian citizenship, just in case<\/a>Jimmy Kimmel buys Emmy campaign billboard\u2026 for Stephen Colbert<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He might have an invested stake in late-night TV enterprise, but Jimmy Kimmel doesn\u2019t believe CBS and Paramount\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":40733,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[49,48,361,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-80630","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80630"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80630\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}