These people will believe Colbert is the world's greatest ratings draw, and the last voice of democracy against "Trump's state-run media." But not that TV is dead.
So here is a quick tl;dr:
Broadcast TV is actually on the upswing. Free live streams have juiced the stats, limited availability of series episodes have improved viewership. Basically the broadcast industry is learning the lesson the RIAA is doing its damnest to unlearn, which is "if you provide your product for free and conveniently, you will make more money than charging".
The psychology on it that I read was, basically: Netflix now 95% utter slop, streaming services are fragmenting shows. Since people can't watch what they actually want to watch, they experience "choice overload" on option B; so if you have a curated stream of quality content with variety, people are more likely to put that on than binging 10 episodes of the same thing. So thanks to Netflix/Prime/Hulu/D+/etc slitting each other's throats, there is now a reemerging market for broadcast content.
there is some more shit to put in here about Hulu improving broadcast audiences because of allowing them to catch up on series, and increasing urban density putting more people in broadcast markers but I assume the point is made. Also about how cable is being dropped now that providers are unbundling TV & internet. And cost-cutting that happened during pandemic.
However, there are two caveats here.
First is that while broadcast TV is getting more eyeballs, those eyeballs are usually not coming from rabbit-ears. They are coming from streaming (YoutubeTV or similar) or local channels over cable.
Second is that Broadcast TV is likely to have a "Horse" effect.
That is, there are more privately owned horses and horse owners in the US NOW than there there in 1880. However, as a percent of the population, its miniscule and the segment of the population that rides horses as a daily method to get around are virtually non-existent (outside of Ohio and Pennsylvania; dutch amish territory) so their impact on the national cultural landscape is nil.
This is a very long, long way to say:
The numbers you need to look at for Colbert are not raw viewership - that is the number of people who just watch the show - but durational. The number of people who check out after the
hour of hate opening monologue is extremely high, and viewership craters. This is standard for late night TV, but usually the viewership will stick around for the "headliner" - but when the headliner is just an "our team" polemic, people immediately check out often during the first commercial break. Ergo, the only ad slots worth a damn is the first one and maybe two, and everything else is SlapChop rates.
that is, not worth the number of daytime/primetime viewers that Colbert is turning away by making CBS seem like MSNBC.
