Megan Basham

Colbert frequently led the ratings among the late night broadcast hosts.

But overall, viewership has really been drying up over the last few years.

His audience had shrunk by about 40 percent from his high in 2018.

And then his show has also been losing an estimated 40 to 50 million dollars a year.

So maybe not surprising that CBS made this decision.

No.

You know, they're very much trying to frame this as purely a financial decision, but I think it's really impossible to separate the politics from the economics here.

Networks have been looking at declining ad revenue and shrinking audiences as so many younger viewers

have migrated over to places like YouTube and TikTok and all of those streaming services.

So all of Late Night, including Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon, all of them have been facing that same kind of audience erosion.

But these shows are also very expensive to produce, and I think that's why alienating half of the potential audience was never a good long-term approach.

And other Late Night hosts are making it clear that they also think that this was about politics.

And then you also have the fact that Colbert is being replaced by a comedian who is explicitly saying he's not going to get political.

So it's really hard to miss that messaging.

Byron Allen is a really interesting figure, and his new deal with CBS is a pretty intriguing model.

So he started out as a comedian, but he built a roughly $5 billion media empire by buying up undervalued properties.

So what CBS is doing here is essentially leasing the hour to Allen through what's called a time-buy arrangement.

So Allen's company will pay for the slot, and he then supplies the programming, and that dramatically lowers CBS's costs and risk.

But Allen's messaging has been that he's going to be a corrective to what late night has become.

He's repeatedly said that he wants viewers to laugh rather than feel lectured.