Will the clock strike midnight for late night?

On Thursday Stephen Colbert announced that Paramount would be concluding The Late Show after a 32 year run. There’s an open question about the underlying rationale for this decision (see: Forbes and Mother Jones). As the debate rages on – we took a look at our insights to see what we could learn. 

Season to date, The Late Show ranks 1st for non-video audience engagement on CBS (excluding sports / specials), and also notably over contributes to the video views taking place on the CBS YouTube channel. Since June 1, the program has generated 56% of all YT video views for the broadcaster (70.3M).

Using the same parameters and date ranges as we did for The Late Show, Kimmel ranks first in non-video engagement and contributes 47% to ABC’s YouTube video views. Fallon ranks first and Seth Meyers ranks fourth, contributing 13% and 15 respectively to NBC’s video views.

Where might Colbert land? There’s a lot of speculation on who might want to engage Colbert after the final year of The Late Show. We dove into which networks have the most similar audiences:

1. NBC (58% audience overlap)
2. Netflix (45%)
3. ABC (40%)
4. HBO / HBO Max (30%)

And from the other perspective, the ‘most different’ major distributor is @Roku, who may want to consider Colbert’s value as a subscriber acquisition driver.

Is it curtains for late night? Or should networks take a seat on the couch and enjoy the show? Keep the lights on with Diesel for more content intelligence insights!