Joe Rogan’s Audience Is 10 Times More Than Anderson Cooper’s

Here is the absolute core of Paramount’s (NASDAQ: PSKY) problem with the news channels it gets in its Warner Bros. Discovery buyout. Ancerson Copper is, by many measures, the most-watched show on CNN, which Warner owns. He stands 23rd overall in cable show ratings, with an audience of about 1.2 million. In sum, Paramount gets CNN as part of its Warner Bros. Discovery deal, which it will pay $81 billion for.

CNN forecasts it will make $600 million this year. That is down from $1 billion in 2016. And, traditional TV ratings overall continue to slip. Cooper makes $18 million a year, which makes him expensive. He also operates out of an equally expensive, state-of-the-art TV studio. Paramount has acquired several legacy TV assets, including Anderson.

Leaving aside the politics of Rogan, he averages 11 million viewers for his podcast. He has 12 million YouTube subscribers. Rogan’s studio is cheap. He brings in as much as $1 million in revenue per episode, and his annual revenue can reach $100 million. Rogan is being paid $250 million over several years to be on Spotify.

And Rogan is one of a fairly long list of inexpensive podcasts with larger audiences than CNN’s.

To put it simply, Rogan’s audience may actually be 20x CNN’s. Again, Andersson is usually the most popular broadcast on CNN, but is still small by the big podcast definition.

Cooper and Rogan are not always measured by the same audience yardsticks, but Rogan’s huge lead shows up in all of the metrics.

This is not about Rogan, it is about what Paramount paid for.

TV insider reports that, in early March, “CNN averaged 1.046 million total primetime viewers and 220,000 in the Adults demo, a 4% and 8% decrease from the previous week, respectively. For primetime viewing, the network finished in fourth place for total viewers and fourth in the key demo.”

Based on the data, Cooper cannot do much, or do anything, to bring his ratings higher. He is being swept away by a flood that is destroying his medium. Rogan, with his cheap production costs, which are a fraction of Cooper’s, indicates that the value of CNN to Paramount has dwindled in the late decade and is dwindling faster.