Dem
50
GOP
50
After CNN canned Chris Licht, they brought in Mark Thompson to right the ship. And he's certainly been putting his stamp on the outlet's operations. A couple of months ago, he laid off over 100 people, including several known "names" (like TV/movie critic Brian Lowry). More recently, he's been moving CNN.com towards a paywall model. The site began requiring people to register to see articles about 6 weeks ago, and now it's planning to start charging for access to articles (after a few freebies each month).
CNN plans to start at an "inexpensive" price. Officially, the reason for this is to "gauge demand," but it's also to get people's credit card numbers, so they hopefully don't worry about it when the price goes up. A sizable number of subscription-based outlets have used this same "ramp up" approach, from Netflix to Disney+ to The Athletic. CNN.com currently receives about 440 million unique visitors per month; Thompson thinks he can convert that into $1 billion in annual revenue. That would be quite the monetization rate for a product that people are used to getting free. In other words, good luck with that.
The primary reason we are interested in this is that CNN's cable channel is dying, and won't be able to support the overall operation much longer. This is not about CNN, per se (at least, it's largely not about CNN), it's about the demise of the whole cable TV business model. For those cable (and, for that matter, broadcast) channels that hope to survive long-term, they are either going to have to find new sources of revenue, or they are going to have to sell themselves direct-to-consumer as part of streaming services (like Max, which is owned by the same parent company as CNN is).
We wonder—and we can't find anyone who has written about this—what this all means for Fox's cable channel. They haven't particularly found ways to monetize the Fox "News" brand, beyond the cable channel. The Fox empire has been broken up, so there may not be a great streaming opportunity out there for them. And Fox's audience is quite old, and not necessarily eager to embrace new technologies. Sure, there are young conservatives out there, but they are mostly doing podcasts and social media, not Fox content. Between the upcoming challenges for the Fox business model, and the succession struggle among the children of Rupert Murdoch, the channel could go into a steep decline a lot sooner than might have been expected, say, 5 years ago. (Z)