How to make big, well, some bucks in late night? According to CBS, the trick is to cancel your traditional show and lease the time to someone else.
The Paramount Skydance broadcast outlet, which has been grilled for weeks over its decision to oust Stephen Colbert and cancel its long-running “Late Show,” says the move will swing its wee-hours business to a profit from a loss.
“We’re proud to partner with Byron Allen on a new business and programming model for late night that proactively addresses a network daypart that was cost prohibitive to continue,” the company said in a statement Thursday. “With this ‘time buy’ model, we have shifted an hour that was losing roughly $40 million annually to $15 million in profit — a $55 million swing.”
CBS has been ridiculed and criticized for weeks as Colbert wound down his program and invited guests who cast opprobrium at network executives. David Letterman, who hosted “Late Show” before Colbert, likened executives behind the cancellation decision to “lying weasels” during an appearance in the waning days of the program.
Much of the industry believes Colbert was cancelled not because of the financial reasons CBS touts but due to a desire by Paramount executives to flatter President Donald Trump, known to dislike late-night comics who poke fun at him and his policies. Colbert was heavily reliant on political humor — a move that helped “Late Show” win more viewers overall than rivals like NBC’s “Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon”a and ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” Indeed, Colbert’s facility with hot, headline-heavy topics helped reverse CBS’ fortunes in late night.
Adding fuel to the fire were what appeared to be lackluster ratings for the debut of Allen’s “Comics Unleashed” roundtable program on the day after Colbert’s finale. The series generated 878,000 total viewers across two half-hour shows on Friday, May 22, according to Nielsen data. The first half-hour was a first-run episode and the second one was a repeat from September. The night before, Colbert’s finale, which drew a larger-than-usual audience, snared more than 6.7 million viewers.
The comparison is not of the apples-to-apples variety, because a late-night host’s last program is bound to win a large audience, just as a repeat aired on a Friday night is not. The decision to launch Allen’s show in Colbert’s time slot on a Friday was surprising, because none of the current crop of late-night programs airs originals regularly on Fridays, meaning the audience does not regularly tune to them in typical numbers.
Under the arrangement CBS has with Allen, the entrepreneur and media owner covers 100% of the production costs and pays CBS a fee for his use of the time period. Allen in turn sells the advertising that appears alongside his shows. No matter the viewership or the ratings for the time period, CBS gets paid the same fee.
All the networks have had to grapple with how to handle late night programs, which remain a staple of American culture and conversation, but no longer draw the crowds they once did when Johnny Carson, Letterman and Jay Leno held sway. Ad spending on late night television shows fell to $209 million in 2025, according to Guideline, down from $519.7 million in 2017 — a drop of nearly 60%. “The Late Show” accounted for 27% of all spending on late-night TV shows in 2025, according to the company’s data, and 29% of all spending so far in 2026.
With the exit of Colbert, many dollars that have stayed with the daypart may migrate to digital, along with the viewers who previously watched the shows around midnight.
