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| Not Shown: Salaries |
1) Jon Stewart is leaving The Daily Show... and also, Samantha Bee and Jason Jones for their own shows on TBS, and, presumably, a host of other lesser-known but wildly important talent that will take the opportunity to follow Bee/Jones and/or Stewart, if he finds something new to keep himself busy. Stewart will be replaced by relatively unknown young comic Trevor Noah.
As a routine viewer of TDS, I love and am going to miss Stewart, the same way that I love and now miss Stephen Colbert. But where I used to watch Colbert every night, now I'm pretty much watching "The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore"... which is probably a net win in the long run for Comedy Central, since Wilmore, especially in Year One, should cost a lot less than Colbert Year Nine. So from a pure blood and dollars standpoint, I have to wonder if Comedy Central might be thrilled, in the long term, to watch him go. Here's why.
Stewart, by dint of his ability to attract a scale audience of wildly attractive young viewers with affluent / college demographics, was making up to $30 million a year from that chair. One has to assume that Jones, Bee and the other emigres were also making nice salaries, given their seniority with the program.
Noah's salary is currently undisclosed... but would anyone be very surprised to hear if he were making as little as 10 to 20% of what Stewart was making? Even at, say, $2 million annually, that would be an opportunity that any young comic worth his salt would leap at. It might also be why Comedy Central had a seeming lack of interest in going after a major name (Tina Fey was many people's dream host)... which also migh speaks to a certain confidence that the network has in the franchise's backhone -- aka, the writing and production staff -- can keep it going at, say, 90 to 95% of the current ratings. And maybe for a whole lot less, or maybe just less, with the remaining staff getting hefty raises for loyalty.
In any event, cutting costs makes a lot of urgent sense who you read that...
2) ESPN is having major issues with Verizon for a "skinny" package that excludes the channel.
According to the Wall Street Journal, every monthly subscriber to cable television in America paid an average of $6.04 per month, or $72.48 a year, for the sports channel. That's over 4X more than they pay TNT, the runner-up in this measurement, and 6X more than Fox News. Coupled with the likely inclusion of ESPN2 on most plans, and Bristol took home over $81 a subscriber last year. Rates are expected to rise by over 39% in the next two years (!).
How have they managed to pull this off? Simple; every other smaller network has been losing ground, and non-sports viewers are simply getting less for more. Which makes Verizon's move a simple matter of economic self-interest in pricing a commodity. Offer a lower priced version which strips out the big ticket piece, and keep the non-sports viewers who might otherwise cut cable entirely.
Up to now, ESPN has been basic despite its cost... and that's absolutely critical, because if the network had to rely solely on the people who watch it for sustenance, the estimated cost would be $37 a month.
Now, it's possible that the network has its hooks that deep into America's sports fans that it could survive on its own, and that the public would simply make it an either/or choice of ESPN or Rest Of Cable. (The average cable bill is, BTW, a little less than $55 a month for everything.) But if and when that happens, you'd have to think there would be some collateral damage for Comedy Central to not keep it's current TDS ratings... or for ESPN to stop being such an attractive source of new to file consumers, since there would be a whole lot less casual viewers at a 6X price jump from the current rate.
Which leads me to the final point....
3) A study last week showed that viewership for TV across the board is down 11% in the US, 13% worldwide, and 33% (!) in the "seed" generation of 14 to 17 year olds.
I don't think it's all about watching stuff on your own screen, or not being in the big TV room with your parents, or preferring short attention span theater of Vine, YouTube and Hulu, though that's clearly a big part of it. I think, instead, that there's a growing and seismic change in the way that cable television is disseminated and paid for, an that the industry is sacrificing long-term stability for short-term profiteering. And that today's younger demos, strapped for cash with weak employment markets, high education costs and an increasing wariness of debt, are not very likely to just go along and pay the freight.
So, rolling this back to the beginning... did Stewart jump, or was he pushed?
And if he was pushed, were ESPN's fingerprints found at the scene of the crime, or did the kids do it?
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You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com. And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.
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