The failure of CNN’s new streaming service will go down in history as one of the worst media disasters ever.
The network poured $300 million dollars into creating and staffing the venture and it failed in barely a month.
Now details are emerging which show that CNN’s projections were completely unrealistic.
Townhall reports:
CNN Thought It Had 29 Million ‘Superfans’ Who’d Pay for CNN+
In the days since the unceremonious demise of CNN+ after a short-lived existence, more information has emerged about what CNN’s executives hoped to do with its streaming platform…and it’s incredibly on-brand for the cable news outlet that claims to be the “most trusted.”
According to presentations obtained and reported by Axios, CNN+ was expected to become *more* profitable than CNN’s cable channel that typically makes around $500 million profit per year. As has become clear since last week’s announcement that CNN+ would be shut down, its new parent company Warner Bros. Discovery was not enthused by the entry into premium streaming content. “The service also did not fit in with Discovery’s broader plans to create one giant, general entertainment streaming service,” Axios noted.
The pitch materials, per Axios, show “[f]inancial projections were based on internal CNN+ research that assumed CNN+ could one day attract nearly 30 million global subscriptions from a total addressable market of roughly 72 million people.”
Those groups of potential subscribers were broken down to include “29 million ‘CNN super fans,’ 24 million ‘news and non-fiction SVOD (subscription video on demand) fans,’ and 36 million ‘global news consumers’ (people who already paid for a news subscription.”
Trending: Steve Hilton: The Idea Of A Second Term For Joe Biden Is Absurd And Offensive (VIDEO)
CNN can’t get a million people to watch their channel during primetime but they thought 29 million people would sign up for their streaming service?
How delusional are the people inside CNN?
They believed there are 30 MILLION “CNN Superfans” who would pay for their product pic.twitter.com/fWcv6XPnmf
— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) April 26, 2022
Is it any wonder why they failed?
