CNN+ Spent $300M for Less Than 10,000 Viewers

CLAY: Buck, I don’t know if you saw this. This news just came down. It’s not serious news, but I think it is pretty wild. CNN+ launched two weeks ago. I would be surprised if very many people out there are watching it in our audience. But this is staggering.

CNBC reported that they spent $300 million so far on the launch, that is, CNN did. How many people do you think are watching on an average day, CNN+?

BUCK: Oh. It’s in the thousands and not hundreds of thousands.

CLAY: Fewer than 10,000 people a day are watching CNN+ — $300 million they spent on this programming, and this is according to CNBC, fewer than 10,000 people are watching.

That means obviously not very many people have actually signed up. And, I mean, that is a staggering failure. And it just reflects — the CNN brand — to me this is an interesting test of the CNN brand, right? Do people like CNN? Do they want to spend more time with the personalities that are involved there?

Was it Quibi that came out with — it was supposed to be short video that ended up being a disaster, they lost billions of dollars? CNN+ feels like from a business perspective it is yet another failure of CNN to expand. People want real time news. They don’t like the personalities otherwise.

BUCK: Let’s also remember Current TV with your buddy, your close friend Keith Olbermann over there, Mr. Travis, they paid him after they flipped a channel that Al Gore convinced a bunch of not-so-bright investors, right, to buy the channel.

CLAY: Oh, yeah, he made a ton of money after that.

BUCK: They flipped the channel, they spent hundreds of millions of dollars, they spent 10 million just on Keith Olbermann alone a year, you know, and they never got, from what I understood, about 10,000 in concurrent watching for that channel at any point in time. Think about that.

CLAY: Wow.

BUCK: Yeah.

CLAY: That is pretty staggering. I mean, when you consider the amount of money that they poured in, $300 million, and they haven’t been able to come close to 10,000 concurrent viewers like in an average day.

I mean, that’s unheard of, Buck. I mean, this is an unheard of failure.