"... from an aggressive nationwide marketing campaign to hiring hundreds of new employees to recruiting big, high-priced media stars, including the former 'Fox News Sunday' anchor Chris Wallace and the former NPR co-host Audie Cornish."
I don't think "tens of millions of dollars" sounds like such a big investment. It seems to me they didn't do enough. The biggest thing they did was entice Chris Wallace. That's a tiny thing to do. Let's not overdo what a failure it was. I wouldn't say "a stunning and ignominious end." I'd say a predictable and dumb fizzle.
What's tens of millions when Elon Musk is offering $45.5 billion to buy Twitter?
ADDED: Here's the top-rated comment: "Speaking as a retiree on a fixed income, how many streaming services is it possible to afford? Ordinary people with modest incomes are being shut out of good content due to affordability. For 40 years I paid for delivery of The Boston Globe and watched TV using an antenna. That was fine. Now everyone wants their money to read or watch anything. It is unsustainable."
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I love that Chris Wallace and some chick I never heard of were the "high priced media stars".
I guess somebody, somewhere, thinks Chris wallace is a "star", and would pay $5/month to see him, but I don't know them.
Wow! Chris Wallace killed it. Even more unpopular with CNN viewers than Fox viewers.
CNN has ruined its own brand.
A large portion of the population now perceives CNN to be a creator and broadcaster of propaganda for the Democrat Party.
I've read that CNN sunk about $400M to date on CNN+, for staff, facilities, and marketing. May have to wait for the year-end financial report to be sure.
Chris has outstanding timing, or a blind spot the size of Tater Stelter. Either way it’s hilarious to observe because he’s such a pompous ass.
"I don't think "tens of millions of dollars" sounds like such a big investment. It seems to me they didn't do enough."
I don't think it would have mattered. The dogs didn't like the dog food.
I realize this is not an original observation, but how could this be considered a "stunning" development? The ratings for CNN have been dropping steadily for months. "Nobody wants to watch our content when we give it away, therefore we should offer the opportunity to pay to watch more of the stuff that they're refusing to watch now."
I can't fathom the denial of reality that it takes to come up with ideas this foolish.
April 21, 2022
"The shutdown is a stunning and ignominious end to an operation into which CNN had sunk tens of millions of dollars..."
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I believe hundreds of millions of dollars invested into this fiasco
"Now everyone wants their money to read or watch anything.
Well, you do pretty much have to pay for an internet connection. But that gives you access to enormous amounts of free content. Sure, Google gets some money off the advertising, but still.
The real puzzle about CNN+ is that some suits apparently thought it could succeed., whereas most of us here thought, like Althouse, that its demise was entirely predictable. Sometimes the prog bubble gets mugged by reality.
Add Chris Wallace and the island of CNN+ will capsiez. Hat tip to Hank Johnson.
And after all Chris was a "heavy" hitter.
I don't really think that investing more into marketing (or anything else) would have helped. Their core product - well, let's see what the ratings have to say about that. According to Forbes:
"In prime time, Fox News finished the quarter with an average total audience of 2.554 million viewers, up 3% from 2021, according to ratings data compiled by Nielsen. MSNBC finished the quarter in second place with an average total audience of 1.205 million viewers—down 46%, while CNN finished third with an average total audience of less than a million viewers: 857,000 viewers, down a staggering 56% from 2021."
They're hemorrhaging viewers on the free product. What in the name of Hearst's ghost made them think they could charge for their product at this particular juncture?
This is the death rattle of old media. CNN was a dominant news channel for 20-30 years, then faded to a niche with the rise of Fox, MSNBC, etc. Moving to digital with CNN+ confirms just how weak old media has become. Go to Youtube, Rumble, etc. for all sorts of rinky-dink to lavish self-produced channels with 10K, 1M, or 10M+ followers. They run professional ads, and accept voluntary contributions of $1, $10, or $100 per month. Just for one random personality or someone doing a random thing.
Old school network content (such as CNN+) often flops, despite efforts to shove it down people's throats. CNN+'s poor performance for even a $10M investment was indeed stunning and ignominious.
Another old cable channel (G4 TV) just flamed out with an expensive and woke 2022 relaunch, but then disappeared in a couple months.
https://gamerant.com/g4tv-host-speaks-out-sexism-games-industry/
Examples of oddball streaming channels with far, far, far more subscribers than CNN+:
Comedy wood turning on a lathe: https://www.youtube.com/c/NZWoodTurning (872K subscribers)
Diving in rivers to harvest lost jewelry and cell phones: https://www.youtube.com/c/DALLMYD (12.7M subscribers)
Towing vehicles stuck in the desert: https://www.youtube.com/c/MattsOffRoadRecovery (1.07M subscribers)
Welcome to the era of genuine "long tail" media -- no more 3 networks or even 50 channel cable packages. Welcome to millions of random neighborhoods, no central integration, and no grand goals.
Enigma, FTFY:
"CNN was a dominant news channel for 20-30 years, then" STOPPED REPORTING NEWS and became a complicit operative of the Democratic Party's permanent campaign and is now using a policy of personal destruction against all non-Democrats.
It is a pity that CNN+ shut down- there's lots of other dog shit that people were hoping to unload in a seller's market.
If anything could bring a tear to my eye, it's this.
THe whole thing made no sense to me. Its like someone started a "Crap Sandwhich +"
"Hey, you loved our crap sandwhich so much, we've got even more crap to sell you".
Wallace showed his intelligence and understanding of TV. He had a good thing before although I had given up on FNS after 2016.
I miss the early days of CNN, with Daniel Schorr and Bernard Shaw. It seemed quite neutral to me, though Rush called it the Clinton News Network. Lol.
CNN and Eyeball News were my favorites back then.
Chris Wallace was stupid to burn bridges by saying he couldn't stay at FOX because they wouldn't admit 1/6 was an insurrection. What Fox viewers would that bring to CNN+? None.
The CNN that had hours of foreign correspondence reports from war zones was interesting. They moved into the personality-driven programing and everyone had the same personality and viewpoint. Who is going to pay for more of that?
Then there's C++, which seems to have stuck. Weak minds need strong typing.
Re that commenter can't he still get over the air tv? I know I can get about a dozen channels here.
No reason I'd ever want to. But I could
John LGKTQ Henry
The biggest thing they did was entice Chris Wallace. That's a tiny thing to do.
Certainly -- compared to enticing Mike Wallace to come on board.
That might have gotten them viewers, not to mention converts and disciples.
They shouldn't have made such a big commitment at the beginning, though.
It would have been better to start on a smaller scale and call the new venture "CNN Plus Or Minus."
Speaking as a retiree on a fixed income, how many streaming services is it possible to avoid?
CNN+ was aborted not just in the first trimester, but before the first missed period.
This fiasco occurred because of a miscommunication. CNN was told that they would have to pay people to watch CNN+, not that people would pay to watch CNN+.
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/researchers-paid-fox-news-viewers-224135956.html
An example of new ownership allowing for decisive action? What did they value CNN+ at in purchase price? Probably zero.
Carol- Yes, CNN used to be good. You know what else was really good when it first started? MSNBC! It was so good, with David Bloom and a wide variety of opinion hosts. I moved out of the country and couldn't believe what it had become when I moved back.
can we All Agree? That Chris Wallace is a worthless pile of sh*t now?
"The network spent $300 million on the new platform, losing $9,375,000 daily. The network’s executives expected nearly 2 million subscriptions within the first year and 15-18 million within four years.
Yeah, right…
The country is roughly equally divide politically. If you assume news watchers are too, then Fox gets one half, and the other half is spread amongst ABC,NBC,CBS,CNN,MSNBC,GOV'T TV, etc.
Any new channel is going to have to bring something completely different to get an audience.
Maybe someone needs to invent Tik Tok news. 30 second bursts of drivel.
All the other 3 letter channels should probably consolidate to a single antifox network.
I am glad NYT wrote about this. It is that last time we will hear about it.
I used to defend Chris Wallace when he was at Fox News. Then he proved that one way to end a career is with a big payoff.
Megyn Kelly did something similar, but she has reinvented herself with a daily interview show on Sirius that you can also watch delayed on YouTube or listen to on Apple podcasts, Spotify, etc. She says about three times a week that she is in the political center, but she has gone right. The culture wars have brought it out. Not much cruel neutrality there.
I have been in the business and commercial world for over 40 years and am absolutely stunned at the stupidity I have seen coming from Corporate America over the last 10 or so years. The people who run these businesses just assume it’s continued success and get distracted by shiny little ego gratifying projects. The obvious examples are in media; CNN, Netflix, Twitter but consider Boeing, GE etc. The demise of GE was stunning but less visible because it’s not media.
A series of bad decisions made by people drowning in hubris. Much like the Biden administration.
CNN+ is, thankfully, now over. But, you can always tune into the long running CNN- through your cable subscriber.
CNN has been limping along far past its selling date because of one thing: the early deals cut with airports and hotels to be their exclusive news channel. In hotels, this is no longer true due to consumer demand/revulsion, but in publicly captive audience spaces such as airports, they still dominate with a product that screens out certain types of upsetting breaking news, namely plane crashes, to service the audience.
If they did not have this market, they would already be a forgotten fart under Ted Turner's duvet. Even their vaunted early foreign coverage was terrible and geopolitically ignorant. The BBC, no slouch in the Department of Woke, was a thousand years ahead in terms of credible foreign affairs reporting: for example, their correspondents spoke more than one language.
I'm always curious after implosions such as this one: What happens to the CNN- executives who greenlit this money-loser? Are they let go?
One of these days, someone is going to figure out that people will not pay $5/month @ for a large number of writers on Substack, but they would pay $20/month for the right to read a large number of writers on Substack. Then they will organize those writers into a collective and sell $20 /month subscriptions. They’ll need a name for this kind of collective. Maybe something made up like “magazine?”
According to Stephen Miller, the launch cost $300M. Not $30M.
"Now you're talking real money."
"According to Stephen Miller, the launch cost $300M."
And every single carbon based life form on the planet (not working for CNN) knew it was going to be money flushed down the toilet. The fact that they spent the money anyway shows you how insular these people are.
One of the differences between Tucker Carlson and Chris Wallace is that Tucker was inherently funny and entertaining even when he was on incompetent lefty MSNBC. The only reason people ever gave a shit about Chris Wallace is because he sometimes grilled Democrats as much as Republicans. If he is on CNN being another moronic Democrat lover, who is going to care about him?
IIRC, Benedict Arnold was at Yorktown as an officer. What were his feelings as he watched the two proxies end his chances of redeeming his name by winning and becoming the Duke of Ohio?
We might ask Wallace that question.
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