TV news viewership collapse
- Morning, evening and late-night network news have each lost roughly half their viewers in recent years. - Forbes illustrated the decline across 'three stark charts' showing about a 50% audience drop. - That audience erosion is evidence of wider fragmentation that complicates passive discovery for film and TV releases (forbes.com).
The audience for network TV news is shrinking fast: morning shows, evening newscasts and late-night staples have each lost about half their viewers over the past decade. (forbes.com) Forbes, citing Nielsen season averages, reported that ABC’s “Good Morning America” fell to 2.6 million viewers in 2024-25 from 4.9 million in 2015-16, while NBC’s “Today” dropped to 2.6 million from 4.71 million and “CBS Mornings” fell to 1.94 million from 3.67 million. (forbes.com) Late night split more sharply by show: NBC’s “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” averaged 1.3 million viewers in 2025, down 64% from 3.6 million in 2015-16, while ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” slipped to 2.0 million from 2.3 million and CBS’s “The Late Show” fell to 2.5 million from 2.75 million. (forbes.com) The evening news held up better, but not by much. Forbes said CBS Evening News was down 41% since 2015 and NBC Nightly News was down 30%, even as the format remained steadier than mornings and late night. (forbes.com) The shift tracks a broader move away from fixed-time television. Nielsen’s Gauge says U.S. TV viewing is now measured across broadcast, cable and streaming, with streaming taking a larger share of total viewing while broadcast and cable lose ground. (nielsen.com) Nielsen’s methodology also shows how much the living-room screen has changed: its monthly Gauge combines linear TV panels with streaming-meter households and counts Live+7 viewing, meaning even delayed viewing is already built into the comparison. (nielsen.com) YouTube has become one of the clearest symbols of that shift. Nielsen said YouTube accounted for 12.4% of all TV viewing in April 2025, the third straight month it led all media companies by share of television usage. (nielsen.com) News habits have fragmented along with entertainment habits. Pew Research Center said 49% of U.S. adults now say they mostly get news because they happen to come across it, up from 39% in 2019. (pewresearch.org) Pew also found that 36% of U.S. adults regularly get news on Facebook and 35% regularly get news on YouTube, with 20% saying the same about Instagram and 20% about TikTok in an August 2025 survey. (pewresearch.org) That leaves the old network schedule with less power to deliver a mass audience at one hour on one screen. The Hollywood Reporter argued this month that 2014 was the last peak year of a true entertainment “monoculture,” and the TV ratings slide since then has given that argument fresh numbers. (hollywoodreporter.com)
