CNN might be "circling the drain" after losing two-thirds of its primetime audience in recent years, and with rival offers from Netflix and Paramount for the network's parent company adding to the uncertainty.
"The decrease, from roughly 1.3 million in 2016 to 553,000 now," the Daily Mail reported Wednesday, fueled "rumors of a possible network sale — something CNN's up-for-grabs parent company has vehemently denied."
"The network's daytime lineup has seen a similar decline as hosts such as Wolf Blitzer failed to move the needle, dropping from 752,000 to 433,000," the U.K. tabloid continued, and "when compared to the same part of the year in 2021, the drops were even more pronounced - 71 percent for primetime and 73 percent during the day."
One line from the Daily Mail report was such a howler that I had to read it twice before sharing it with you: "CNN has lost nearly two-thirds of its primetime viewers over the past decade, even with fresh figures like Kaitlan Collins leading coverage."
Fresh. Figures.
Collins is fresh in the sense that she's been around CNN less time than, say, Jake Tapper has — and I'm almost certain that Wolf Blitzer's contract (first signed in 1990!) guarantees him an anchor spot for an additional 15 years following his death. This clause might already have kicked in.
Anyway, Collins joined CNN nine years ago, so we can debate just how "fresh" her face is after nearly a decade. But even after we acknowledge that she's at least far fresher than Blitzer, what freshness — what alternative viewpoint, what captivating news beat, what viral social media attraction — did she bring to the network?
[crickets]
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the crux of CNN's problem.
CNN, whatever its biases, used to be the place people went for breaking news. We go to X for that now, and only a little later come back to your favorite PJ Media writers for the analysis and perspective needed to try and make sense of it all.
I watched the Gulf War almost every waking hour on CNN. I watched Israel's 12-Day War on X.
It's impossible to tell what CNN's social platform strategy is, aside from posting links to the stuff on their website — and even that's a bit of a bellyflop. According to that Daily Mail report, CNN.com gets about 120 million visits per month, and according to publicly available data, most of those visits are brief. Scan a headline, maybe read the first few sentences, and then move on.
A not-so-large communications company that I might happen to work for attracts roughly the same number of visitors — company-wide, not at any individual site — and does it with a staff and budget much smaller than CNN's.
And let's not even talk about CNN+, the network's attempt at a paid streaming service that cost $300 million to set up, and was shuttered after just four months.
CNN missed the move to social media, blew it on streaming, and its embrace of 24-hour-a-day nonstop TDS ten years ago just happened to coincide with the loss of nearly two-thirds of their viewers, many of whom are literally captive audiences in airport terminals around the world.
But here's the real shocker: TDS actually worked for CNN for a while. But like a short-term sugar buzz, they quickly came crashing back down.
In 2015, CNN's viewership was at a lousy 711,000 during primetime. So when Daily Mail reported that viewership dropped to 553,000 from 1.3 million, that only tells part of the story.
Typical for CNN, eh?
Anyway, if we compare pre-TDS CNN to today, the network has lost less than a quarter of its audience. The two-thirds headline number only comes from the 2016-2017 TDS sugar high, led as the DM put it, "by anti-Trump anchors including Jim Acosta, Don Lemon and Brianna Keilar."
Acosta and Lemon are gone and mostly forgotten, Lemon's recent antics aside. And while Keilar is still at CNN, I had to check because she seems to have gone into stealth mode, unable now to even generate any crazy-eyed TDS hits on social media.
At least as a way to grab viewers and ad revenue, this tells me that TDS is a spent force.
What's that mean for CNN? I have no idea, but I'm sure I'll read about it first on X right before I give you the perspective here on PJ Media.
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