When Jon Stewart left “The Each day Present” in 2015, he had a modest however significant viewers on cable TV. When he comes again subsequent month, he’ll discover that in his absence, the present’s viewers has gotten a lot, a lot smaller.
And far, a lot older.
You’ll be able to see the story specified by two charts utilizing knowledge from Nielsen. “The Each day Present’s” general viewers has shrunk by 75% — from 2.2 million viewers an evening to 570,000.
And the age of the viewers has skyrocketed as a result of youthful viewers are barely watching in any respect.
When Stewart left, the median age of his viewers was 48.2 years previous. Now it is 63.3.
It isn’t information that TV audiences have been shrinking for years and that youthful individuals are more and more tuned out of TV. And that the pattern impacts every kind of viewing, however significantly in late-night.
You’d see comparable struggles when you plotted the viewers for Jimmy Fallon or Jimmy Kimmel.
Nonetheless, that is a type of issues the place you possibly can know these things intellectually — and nonetheless be shocked whenever you see it laid out.
On Wednesday, once I acquired these numbers from Nielsen, I requested somebody who has spent loads of time in late-night TV to guess the age of the Each day Present’s viewers immediately. He underestimated it by about 20 years. After I informed him the true reply he texted again: “OMFG.”
The opposite apparent caveat right here is that “Each day Present” community Comedy Central, its proprietor Paramount, and everybody else in TV is aware of that their viewers has been shrinking and growing older. And so they’re doing their finest to discover these viewers on digital retailers like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
For example: I am unsure I’ve ever seen Trevor Noah, Stewart’s successor, on common TV. However I’ve positively watched loads of him on TikTok — together with off-camera interactions which are simply as fascinating because the stuff that runs on TV.
Similar goes for NBC’s “Saturday Evening Reside,” which I watch virtually completely on my cellphone, in clip kind. Youthful readers could also be shocked to be taught that in 2006, NBC freaked out when the “Lazy Sunday” sketch from SNL went viral on YouTube, and demanded that the location take it down. (It is again there now.)
However regardless that that sort of distribution is the long run, TV networks immediately nonetheless make most of their cash reaching viewers on … TV. So to make this work, Comedy Central should hope Stewart can pull off a serious, main turnaround.
