Jed Rosenzweig appears to be a throwback among and a current rarity among journos that cover media. One who seems to not only know research but who’s inspired enough by data he sees to be inspired enough to write a story about it.
Rosenzweig, among the many hats he currently wears, is the founder and publisher of LATENIGHTER, a site that was launched in 2024 as a compliment to PRIME TIMER, which itself was a spin-off of the TV TATTLE franchise he continues to publish on a daily basis. PRIMETIMER was sold to the aggregator SPORTSKEEDA last year, just in time for Rosenzweig’s beat to be in the national spotlight in the wake of all the news and other mishagoss that was going on in the daypart. Timing being everyhing, LATENIGHTER began to become a resource that dozens of more prominent reporters from entertainment, political and larger media sites sourced. Myself included, to be honest. If for no other reason than he apparently took some of the cache he pocketed from the sale of PRIMETIMER and chose to invest in data–a point the very first words of his latest deep dive that he dropped yesterday:
A quick note to fellow media reporters: LateNighter pays to license Nielsen ratings data in order to independently cover late-night TV viewership trends. If these figures inform your own reporting, please credit and link back to this post. We appreciate the collegial courtesy, and it helps sustain this reporting.
Consider yourself heeded and duly accredited, Mr. Rosenzweig. And allow me to congratulate you for continuing to focus on a story that most of the others who were attempting to rip you off had already moved past or at least gone on summer vacation from their own obsession.
When Stephen Colbert was silenced just before Memorial Day by what so many perceive as the fascist regime at CBS and drove away millions of viewers and what sometimes seemed like tens of millions of x-eeters to declare their entire relationship with the network –and in many cases the Paramount conglomerate–permanently ruptured plenty of stories were written about the decree of decline that Byron Allen’s upgraded time buy caused in the daypart–a smoking gun that was repeated for weeks long after its actual shelf life expired. Some theoretically more tenacious reporters spent a good deal of June trying to double or even triple down on what they saw as a domino effect that supported the hues and cries that we all saw on pretty much every social media platform other than Truth Social.
THE DAILY BEAST’s cited the likes of STATUS and the pontifications of pundits and academics that attempted to connect dots to additional losses they believed Colbert’s cancellation brought about. Our frequently and deservedly sourced “peacenik” Evan Shapiro did a substantial amount of forensic accounting to support his conclusions that contrary to the narrative that CBS and, by definition, the Ellisons and their friends, were offering the conglomerate was actually making money . And as the news division headed by whom they perceive to be the ultimate toady continues to hit lows both in the morning and evening I continue to receive regular updates on those hemorragings even when I don’t request them. Some of those reports have even resurrected the age-old myth that the network’s late night declines are directly related to those morning drops since people tend to wake up with the same channel they fall asleep to. (I would offer that could be true for those who set the timer on their bedroom TV that receives linear signals and, with CBS’ skew, there’s probably a greater proportion of them present there than on a lot of their competitors. But I’m not aware of anyone who’s done an actual study of late to update that, and anyone who has fallen asleep watching online know that phenomenon is no longer true. It’s a lesson I’ve personally learned during this heat wave).
Thankfully, Rosenzweig isn’t jumping on that bandwagon–he’s staying in his lane and continuing to focus on the late night wars even with Jimmy Kimmel on vacation and Rosie O’Donnell’s upcoming guest host stint still ahead of us. So that left him time to parse over those Nielsens he’s paying for and deliver this aha insight following his accreditation disclaimer yesterday:
Say what you will about Byron Allen’s low-cost, big-tent approach to late-night comedy—and people certainly do—but his new two-hour CBS block continues to turn up surprises in the ratings…(A)s we’ve previously reported, Allen’s first month of ratings showed an audience that behaves differently from the rest of late night: unusually live, largely undeterred by repeats, and strongest on Fridays. A second month has surfaced another pattern—and it may be the most distinctive yet.
(M)easured by retention—the share of viewers who stay as the night wears on—Allen’s shows hold their audiences better than the CBS lineup they replaced, and far better than the competition they face deeper into the night. Compare CBS’s 11:35 p.m. hour in June 2026 with the same hour one year earlier. Colbert’s Late Show and Allen’s Comics Unleashed decline at nearly the same rate over the first 15 minutes. Then the lines diverge:
Colbert’s total audience kept falling through the hour, ending at 40 percent of the viewers who had been watching at 11:35. Allen holds 53 percent—and unlike Colbert, he’s the norm, not the exception. Most late-night shows shed their audience gradually over the hour; The Late Show shed it fast. The demo shows a similar gap: Allen retains 60 percent of his 18–49 viewers, compared with 46 percent for Colbert.
Where Allen truly separates from the field is an hour later, when Funny You Should Ask airs opposite NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers. Meyers slides to 56 percent of his opening audience over the hour, while Funny You Should Ask holds 81 percent—the flattest line in late night. That stickiness produces a surprising result by the end of the night. Last month, Allen’s two-hour block opened at 11:35 p.m. with 37 percent of the audience Colbert drew in June 2025. Two hours later, at 1:35 a.m., the block was delivering CBS affiliates 89 percent of the audience After Midnight signed off with a year earlier.
Put another way: CBS’s new late-night block starts far behind the lineup it replaced and ends nearly even—not because Allen builds an audience, but because he holds on to the one he has, while last year’s shows were bleeding theirs away.
These graphics sure look impressive, and even gave ol’ Jed the opportunity to man-splain about what he seems to think is WHY this “phenomenon” is occurring:
On conventional late-night programs, the show’s opening segment is the main event—timely, topical, and usually the most widely circulated part of the show. It’s also what makes those shows perishable. Allen’s shows, by design, carry no such freight. Nothing in them is pegged to a particular day, which is why they play virtually the same in reruns—repeats of Comics Unleashed at 11:35 p.m. drew 95 percent of the first-run audience in June—and why the block can be stripped across the schedule indefinitely.
Full disclosure: I’m an unapolgetic fan of Allen’s business acumen and atypical loyalty–points I made around the time when Colbert Derangement Syndrome was at its peak. This story was actually amplified by a couple of Allen’s senior executives who are obviously elated that someone with a larger megaphone than moi chose to even address these realities.
But at the risk of alientating these giddy long-time friends, I feel compelled to remind that these trend lines reflect PROPORTIONS, not deliveries. When one deals with smaller numbers the likelihood of keeping more of less can be enhanced merely by statistical incidence as opposed to formatting.
If indeed it is structure that supports Rosenzweig’s conclusions the fact that FUNNY YOU SHOULD ASK was showing even stronger trend lines–most notably with the 18-49 sliver–then I find it disappointing that lost in translation was the fact that it’s not even a talk show. It’s an actual game show, as opposed to the improv-driven AFTER MIDNIGHT that ran in the 12:37 am hour than FYSA now occupies a year ago that was merely dressed up to be like one. And to be even fairer, with a few exceptions the episodes of the Jon Kelley-hosted “Hollywood Chairs” are mostly encores from those previously aired in syndication windows–including a post-CBS late night slot that the show adequately filled following the encores of AFTER MIDNIGHT that kept the time slot warm until COMICS UNLEASHED’s time buy from last season kicked in. That’s far more of an apples-to-apples comparison than anything involving that show and Colbert.
I know these are the dog days of summer, and I applaud someone who even tries to look at Nielsen data these days to tell any kind of a story. I’m aware that Allen’s people are working longer hours than usual to do so, if for no other reason than they are responsible for selling the commercial inventory and they sure aren’t getting much help toward those efforts from more casual observers of the daypart than Rosenzweig. Being unwarrantingly dragged into discourse that suggests they are contributing to the decline of civilization is not the kind of attention anyone deserves–certainly since no one has yet attempted to discern via a cutback duplication study how many of Allen’s current viewers are actually those who did watch Colbert earlier this year. I’ll offer an educated guess that proportion is pretty impressive in its own right.
Nor has anyone to the best of my knowledge taken a gander at how much total reach COMICS UNLEASHED has generated since its time period upgrade and how that compares to its average audience. Again, my experience with similar analyses would suggest that there’s an awful lot of folks who claim they have dropped CBS for good who have not, and have somehow through recividism found their way back to giving Allen’s content at least a drive-by viewing. We know from frequency analyses that the 700,000 and change that show up for CU on a typical weeknight are largely not the exact same ones that show up the night before or after. I’d contend if someone is trying to disspell the belief that the “massive” boycott that Colbert’s departure produced actually happened such a study would hold much more water with the experts that actually care about these matters than the ones that Rosenzweig has offered.
I don’t offer these suggestions to be persnickety and bitchy. Frankly, I’d crave the chance and access to Nielsen data that I once had to assist someone like Rosenzweig or the Allen Media researchers to help them determine if these stories exist at all. My rate card is minimal and my appetite is optimal. But at this point I honestly wonder how many of those others who were making this all a national headline at the beginning of the summer still actually give a fig? You tell us, Jed. You know your audience better than I do. From this outsider’s view, I’m not sure all that many beyond the Byron-verse were staying up late waiting for this.
I’ve used the phrase “Admiral of the Nebraska Navy” in previous musings. That’s genuine snark, to be sure. But considering its genesis comes from the fact that Nebraska has proportionately less water–0.68 percent of its square mileage–than any other state in the union it’s a title grounded in reality. With similar framing, I now offer that title with respect and salutations to Jed Rosenzweig.
Any chance you’ve got an opening for a Seaman Recruit?
Until next time…