• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Byron Allen gets the Colbert timeslot

TheBigA said:
Once again, not true. Here's 2024:

He was consistently #1 for broadcast TV.
Click to expand...
Per Variety, the combined real time and next 24 hour viewership in the second quarter of 2025 was 1.77 million,

Here is the Forbes report, also on the "normal" period prior to the Kirk controversy: "Jimmy Kimmel Ratings Over The Years: He Was No. 1 With Young Adults"

Here is another report on his ratings before the "Kirk Suspènsion" where his average was 1.1 million by August 2025.

Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show was bleeding viewers before Disney-owned ABC pulled the plug and suspended him for his comments on Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Nielsen data showed sharp summer declines and a year-long slide that leaves him trailing late-night rivals such as Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld and CBS star Stephen Colbert. According to monthly Nielsen figures, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” dropped to just 1.1 million total viewers in August 2025, down 43% from January’s 1.95 million. His August household rating of 0.35 marked the weakest showing of the year. (NY Post)

So the second quarter was around 1.77 million, but down to 1.1 million by August. (Caveat: the news media tends not to specify whether those numbers they publish are "live broadcast" only or include streaming after the broadcast in any format and, if so, whether "same day", "next 24 hours" or what.
 
TheBigA said:
Charlie Kirk was killed in 2025.
Click to expand...
My typo. I corrected it. I'm trying to type after surgery , and not very successfully. The data is from 2025, the mistype was my fault. That should have been obvious, of course.
 
davideduardo said:
Per Variety, the combined real time and next 24 hour viewership in the second quarter of 2025 was 1.77 million,
Click to expand...

This thread is about Colbert, not Kimmel.

In 2025, CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert averaged about 2.545 million total viewers across the year, according to Nielsen Live+7 data TV Insider+1. This placed it as the most-watched program in the 11:35 p.m. late-night slot for the year, though it saw a slight year-over-year decline compared to 2024.
Click to expand...
 
TheBigA said:
This thread is about Colbert, not Kimmel.
Click to expand...
Break into viewership by quarters. Things changed
after the Kirk assassination, affecting the audiences of all three wired network shows which is why I tried to put it into context. Obviously, I did not do that any too well. But the point is that all three were lower before that incident and were "goosed" by all the suddenly available topical subject matter as all three had long before become political commentary shows. Steve Allen and Johnny Carson they are not.
 
Weiserguy said:
David, you're entitled to your own opinions, but not to inventing your own facts to back them up. Stop it already.
Click to expand...
Amen.

In the interests of accuracy:

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert Ratings

Latest Nielsen ratings of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert television program on CBS.
ustvdb.com ustvdb.com

Colbert was a pretty consistent 2.5-3 million viewers a night before cancellation. Numbers below that were rerun weeks (12 per year) and Friday repeats (all 52 per year).

I may be relaxing on Lago Maggiore in Italy, but the gaslighting horseshit is something I’m never gonna let go by without correction.
 
michael hagerty said:
Amen.

In the interests of accuracy:

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert Ratings

Latest Nielsen ratings of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert television program on CBS.
ustvdb.com ustvdb.com
Click to expand...
I was referring all along to the Live+24 numbers prior to the brief cancellation in the first quarters of last year. You posted the post-Kirk incident numbers, which benefited greatly from the publicity and controversy.
 
michael hagerty said:
Amen.

In the interests of accuracy:

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert Ratings

Latest Nielsen ratings of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert television program on CBS.
ustvdb.com ustvdb.com

Colbert was a pretty consistent 2.5-3 million viewers a night before cancellation. Numbers below that were rerun weeks (12 per year) and Friday repeats (all 52 per year).

I may be relaxing on Lago Maggiore in Italy, but the gaslighting horseshit is something I’m never gonna let go by without correction.
Click to expand...

I don't mean to interrupt your vacation, but I think I'm missing something...

Was Stephen Colbert suspended for remarks he made in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death?
 
Deus Ex Machiato said:
I don't mean to interrupt your vacation, but I think I'm missing something...

Was Stephen Colbert suspended for remarks he made in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death?
Click to expand...
No. And even if he had, the numbers I posted go back to Q1 of 2025—six to eight months before the Kirk murder.

What David had been posting lines up with Jimmy Kimmel’s ratings, not Colbert’s. If it weren’t for a year of prior gaslighting about late night on this board, I might give the benefit of the doubt, but I’m way beyond that.
 
l.smartnews.com

Stephen Colbert’s Late Show replacement is a depressing sign of the times (The Guardian)

The applause, dear God, the applause. It has you bracing against the headboard and groping for the remote when Comics Unleashed...
l.smartnews.com l.smartnews.com

"Comics Unleashed is not a show you tweet about in the moment, discuss the next morning or DVR with anticipation. It exists one evolutionary rung above a looped fireplace video, the sort of thing Walmart might run silently on a showroom TV wall."

".....Allen – a hack comic who parlayed repackaged media assets into a billion-dollar fortune – has been willing to compete with the makers of the ThighMaster and the George Foreman Grill for bargain-bin network airtime."

Looks like "The Guardian," or at least this Atlanta based features writer, isn't a fan of the show or Mr Allen.
 
davideduardo said:
What is worthy of criticism is the disto4rted "rawstory" article which compares the totally unique last night of Colbert with the first week of Allen's material. Normally, Colbert averaged 1.0 to 1.5 million viewers, not the overr-six-million that he got on the farewell show.

So the real issue is a million average viewers with much lower expense better than 1.5 million and a loss of about $3 million a month?
Click to expand...
Wow, only 6M for the finale? That pales in comparison to what Letterman pulled and is a small fraction of what Leno and Carson pulled for their final shows.
 
umfan said:
Wow, only 6M for the finale? That pales in comparison to what Letterman pulled and is a small fraction of what Leno and Carson pulled for their final shows.
Click to expand...

All of broadcast TV has been hurt by the rise of streaming. On any given night, more people watch Netflix than any broadcast network. That situation didn't exist ten years ago.
 
umfan said:
Wow, only 6M for the finale? That pales in comparison to what Letterman pulled and is a small fraction of what Leno and Carson pulled for their final shows.
Click to expand...
Linear TV is a dying medium, so views are down across the board. The clips pulled from Colbert's final episode have several million views each on YouTube -- almost 6 million just for his final monologue.
 
A couple of things people are forgetting in this discussion:

CBS never used ratings or any other kind of measure of audience performance to justify the cancellation. It was always "the show is losing money" or some variant thereof. CBS could have backed up its claim by releasing detailed financial statements so the public could judge for ourselves. Instead, a few selected figures were leaked. Meanwhile (!), the timing of the cancellation seemed just a little too coincidental with other Paramount goals, raising public suspicions that haven't dispelled. But arguing the worth of Colbert or of his show using ratings measurements is not what this is about.

Ratings will be irrelevant to CBS as far as "Comics Unlimited" is concerned. CBS's revenue is guaranteed. Byron Allen's the one on the hook for it. And, I suspect, he's less in it for the money than for the ego boost of having a show in the prestigious late-night slot. He could be running commercials for Ginsu knives and, I believe, not really care all that much about how that would look.

In short, arguing ratings for the situation as it is in 2026 is beside the point, for multiple reasons.

The other thing: the first year of Colbert's "Late Show", ratings performance was inconsistent. In 2016, that mattered to CBS. Colbert explicitly wanted to do a classic late-night variety show. He was tired of the "Stephen Colbert" character and the performance art that it entailed. He toned down the politics...just as the political conversation in the country was ramping up and becoming ever more polarized. His timing for that was not good. So CBS persuaded him to bring in Chris Licht...a morning-show producer...who made the show more topical. That meant making it more political, this time with Colbert as himself. It worked. Depoliticizing the time slot is not going to gain audience and, I believe, will lose substantial audience. Again, it doesn't matter now for CBS since Allen is buying the time. What might matter for CBS is losing original content that it can monetize through clips on social media.
 
Mark Roberts said:
What might matter for CBS is losing original content that it can monetize through clips on social media.
Click to expand...

The only real bright is the NFL and sports. Except the NFL wants more money:

cordcuttersnews.com

The NFL is Asking CBS to Pay An Extra $1 Billion to Keep NFL TV Rights | Cord Cutters News

The National Football League has entered advanced negotiations with Paramount, the parent company of CBS, to restructure its existing media rights agreement for Sunday afternoon games. This development stems from recent corporate changes at Paramount, including its acquisition activities and a...
cordcuttersnews.com cordcuttersnews.com

The other problem Paramount has is its relationship with the creative community. The messy way the Colbert thing was handled doesn't sit well with the creative people, who Paramount relies on to come up with TV shows and movies. The WBD merger makes it even worse.
 


Back
Top Bottom