[Dilbert San Diego]

A $300 million investment just dissolves overnight???

I’m no media mogul, but, with so much money and resources of talent such as Chris Wallace involved, wouldn’t they take more time than just a month, to see if they can gain an audience???

Or, is it a situation where there are staggering operating losses, for each day they continue to operate with only 10,000 viewers, which prompted them to pull the plug?

[cgbg]

The shareholders should demand a bunch of firings for this debacle.

Stupid needs to hurt.

[Flavious_Maximus]

The subscription service was $4.99 a month. That comes to $1665 a day of revenue. That would pay the salaries of maybe one producer and a Grip/Lighting Technician.

[Graybeard58]

I’m no media mogul, but, with so much money and resources of talent such as Chris Wallace involved, wouldn’t they take more time than just a month, to see if they can gain an audience?

.......................................................

If they had only polled F.R. before investing gazillion$, they would have known it was gonna be a catastrophic flop.

Chris Wallace should have been their number one clue.

[verum ago]

A $300 million investment just dissolves overnight???

I’m no media mogul, but, with so much money and resources of talent such as Chris Wallace involved, wouldn’t they take more time than just a month, to see if they can gain an audience???

Or, is it a situation where there are staggering operating losses, for each day they continue to operate with only 10,000 viewers, which prompted them to pull the plug?

It's the staggering operating losses one. Or put by way of analogy: if your airplane loses its engine on the climb out after takeoff and you don't have much altitude or airspeed, you don't keep trying for your original destination. You make an emergency landing (or in this case, put on a parachute and jump).

CNN+ was a terrible idea from the start, and doomed from the start. If you read the article, it does give some insight into why they tried it: CNN's ratings have been plummeting for the past year plus while streaming services have been booming (collectively, there are some strugglers like Netflix in there), so they figured streaming is the way to go.

Problem is, they didn't actually examine why CNN's ratings have been in free fall: they ascribed it to being a 'legacy' media platform (all of which are suffering right now), when in fact CNN has performed very poorly relative to the other legacy platforms for awhile now. In other words, they thought they had a generic platform issue common to the industry due to changing times, when really they have a content / viewer trust issue.

But human nature and egos being what they are, they couldn't admit to themselves that they need to change their actual product, not just its delivery method- the former requires some unpleasant introspection, while the latter allows them to adopt a "victim" mindset- specifically, they're 'victims of the times,' which works well with their leftist thinking.

CNN+ had 150,000 subscribers, with only ~10,000 online at a time during daylight hours, which is pretty dismal. That gives them what, 9 million dollars of annual revenue? 9 million doesn't even pay for the top 5 personalities/pretty faces, never mind all the other 'talent,' the "hundreds" of other workers, taxes, operating costs, etc... And this article doesn't mention it, but I recall seeing at least one other article mentioning that CNN+ viewership actually dropped after the first 10 days or so. That's a horrible sign. Not many people even cared to try the service in the first place, and many of those didn't like it enough to continue viewing- CNN+ needed explosive growth just to remain solvent, but was likely in fact facing a wave of subscription cancellations, possibly large enough to offset additional subscriptions.

I guess all of the above is a longwinded way of invoking the old saying that the Discovery execs wisely decided to follow:

Don't throw good money after bad

[scrabblehack]

I’m guessing quite a few of the 150k subscribers got a free month, and hadn’t signed up to pay the monthly fee with only a few days left in the month.

Now the 10k that were watching - the same 10k throughout the day or were they different?