With last week’s bombshell announcement that CBS will not renew The Late Show with Stephen Colbert when the host’s contract expires in May 2026, the Tiffany Network is poised to say farewell to the very format it pioneered more than three-quarters of a century ago.
CBS introduced the first late-night TV show, The Faye Emerson Show, in 1949. It was also the longtime home of one of the true titans of the genre in David Letterman, whose move from NBC to CBS in 1993 triggered the so-called “war for late night” that would reverberate across the industry for the next two decades.
(It was also, ever-so-briefly, home to The Pat Sajak Show, proving that the Eye Network hasn’t always been great at identifying late-night talent.)
The demise of The Late Show franchise represents not just a notable exit for CBS, it also seems like a cultural milestone—the first nail in the coffin for what had been one of TVs most stalwart and reliable money makers, and another body blow to what for decades was the most powerful and influential medium in human history.
The cancellation of Colbert has been interpreted by many as yet another instance of a media owner attempting to appease U.S. President Donald Trump, from whose administration CBS's parent company, Paramount, is currently seeking approval for a mega-merger with Skydance Media.
That’s an understandable conclusion, albeit unproven.
Yes, there’s plenty of evidence of Trump and his enablers threatening and bullying the critics of his administration. Pressuring CBS/Paramount to take Colbert off the air feels very much like the kind of thing he would do.
But there’s also plenty of evidence to suggest that the decision was inevitable in the face of changing media consumption and the accompanying impact on advertising. That shift has been happening for a while now. IAB Canada first reported that digital overtook TV as Canada’s largest advertising medium more than a decade ago, in 2014.
And the gap has only become more pronounced since then: WPP’s most recent “This Year Next Year” report predicted that pure-play digital will account for 73.2% of the $1.08 trillion in global ad spend this year.
It has been widely reported that Colbert’s show was losing $40 million a year, with ad revenues plunging from $121.1 million in 2018 to $70.2 million the previous year. A recent report in Variety stated that executives “could not look away from declines in ad support for the entire format.”
The late night shows were once one of the tentpoles of broadcasters’ business, attracting hundreds of millions of advertising dollars each year. But those days—and those dollars—are long gone. And like late-night viewers, they’re probably not coming back.
According to The New York Times, citing data from advertising data firm Guideline, the networks’ late-night shows attracted a combined $220 million in ad revenue last year, a 50% drop from seven years earlier. The Late Show... alone lost $50 million in advertising revenue over that period.
Ratings for Colbert peaked at about 3.1 million viewers per night during the 2017-18 season. Compare those numbers with the undisputed king of late night, Johnny Carson. The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson averaged some 40 million viewers during its heyday, with his final show in 1992 drawing an estimated 55 million viewers.
According to The New York Times at the time, advertisers paid an estimated $200,000 for a 30-second spot in Carson’s final show, which represented a five-fold increase over its usual rate of $40,000, putting it on par with the big prime time sitcoms of the day, such as Roseanne.
Variety reported that the average cost of a 30-second spot on The Late Show... in 2021 was $21,511, undeniable proof of the downward pressure on ad rates caused by declining ratings over the past 30 years.
However, there’s also an argument to be made that the late-night shows have adapted particularly well to the shifts in media consumption, successfully migrating their content to the very same social video networks that are taking eyeballs and advertising away from broadcasters.
Late Night with Seth Meyers handily won its 12:37 a.m. timeslot with 900,000 viewers according to the latest numbers from Nielsen. Yet those numbers are dwarfed by the show’s reach and impact on digital. Its YouTube channel has more than 5 million subscribers, and the most recent instalment of Myers’ popular segment “A Closer Look” garnered 2.1 million views and more than 6,200 comments.
But that viewership hasn’t translated into the type of revenue the broadcasters are seeking. “[W]hile many of the late-night shows have found a meaningful audience on platforms like YouTube by creating original content or repackaging their TV segments, the revenue from those digital sources can’t offset the lost dollars from linear TV,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter.
The networks’ late-night hosts went all-in on Trump when he was first elected president in 2016, with Colbert and his late-night peers, like Myers and Jimmy Kimmel, using their shows to critique and criticise his actions. Colbert’s unrelenting jokes about Trump helped propel his show into top spot in the late-night rankings after struggling to find its footing in the wake of its 2015 debut.
Even as far back as 2018, The Washington Post noted that “When Americans watch late-night comedy, the joke’s on Donald Trump.” And a 2024 study from the Media Research Centre noted that 81% of all late-night political jokes in 2023 targeted conservatives.
Maybe in time we’ll find out that in fact Paramount axed Colbert to placate Trump. The more likely reality is that, paradoxically, Trump may have been the best thing to happen to late night over the last decade—providing comedic oxygen to a genre gasping for air.
But even the prospect of four more years of biting jokes, skits and Trump impersonations weren’t enough to paper over the economic realities of modern media. Trump might have been very good for the business of comedy, but he couldn’t save the business of TV.
