10 ms·

Big cuts coming for CNN+ after slow start

56 points by uptown 5y ago

mikeweiss 5y ago
Of course people aren't paying $6 a month for news, they really mis-calculated the audience for this. People who watch CNN already subscribe to cable (Traditional or OTT) It should've always just been an add on or included in HBO max for free to add additional value to that streaming platform. It's not too late, they could easily integrate it with HBO max to offer live news to all who subscribe.
- sfblah 5y ago
  My take on this was it was just a clone of the Fox News pay service. The CNN one would just be from a left-leaning perspective or some such. I bet if they market it better, it will do OK.
  - downrightmike 5y ago
    Then they've missed the mark, because they aren't left, just center.
    - sfblah 5y ago
      I don't know about the leanings of CNN+, since I don't pay for it. I do know that Don Lemon and (former host) Chris Cuomo are obviously slanted left. I don't know if there's an objective way to measure this, so I just look at my own reactions, as I know I'm a moderate (my most recent presidential votes were Biden, Clinton, Romney, Obama, Bush; and I support about half of each party's political platform -- I'm pro-choice, pro-nuclear, anti-gun, anti-woke).
  - dbbk 5y ago
    If you've seen anything from Chris Cillizza you wouldn't say CNN is left-leaning. Also, their major star of CNN+ is Chris Wallace who they poached from Fox News.
    - sfblah 5y ago
      That's interesting. I don't pay for CNN+, so I'm just familiar with their standard news coverage, which is definitely left-slanted.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  I'd pay $6 a month for actual informative content, but have you ever actually watched cable news for an extended amount of time? It's mostly just inane blathering and repeating the same thing over and over. They just don't have more than 30 minutes worth of information to share each day, but they stretch it to 24 hours. If they upped the information content, lowered the emotional appeal, and just covered a whole lot more I bet they could boost their audience...
mountainriver 5y ago
I used to really like CNN back in like 2010. Over the years its just become worse and worse to the point I don't read it anymore. It's basically turned into gossip news and is constantly skewing reality in favor of profits. I'm over it, and I think most other people are as well.
- xkbarkar 5y ago
  Anecdotally yeah. Agree. To me cnn is the exact same garbage as fox. Just leftist instead of rightist. I never click on any links to either media. Actually I used to line the guardian but in the past two years the quality of their reporting also just went alarmist and hyperbolic. In some cases blatantly inaccurate. Looking for a good news source currenty that arent afraid of critizicing any political party and their actions.
  - oldmanhorton 5y ago
    I think Shepherd Smith on CNBC is generally pretty good. He definitely does some entertainment and "feel good" stories but for the most part there's less commentary and opinion than most other cable news.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - g42gregory 5y ago
    Jonathan Turley, Glenn Greenwald.
    - lampshades 5y ago
      > Glenn Greenwald Who is actually on Fox quite a bit these days, funnily enough. 15-25 year old me would have laughed in disbelief, but if I decide to turn on cable news these days, I turn on Fox. Edit: Also, Whitney Webb at Mint Press News is very good, just to throw her in the ring.
      - 5y ago
tyingq 5y ago
First I've heard of it, and I spend a fair amount of time watching news, mostly PBS, SkyNews, and AlJazeera. All of which I can see on my Roku without spending any money. Feels like they missed something in their marketing plan. I may have seen the little + there when skimming cnn.com at some point, but didn't understand it was some new product. But, as mentioned in the first paragraph, I don't have a strong need for a paid product at the moment anyway. Edit: Probably doesn't help that Google doesn't know what it is either...[search for cnn+] -> "Showing results for CNN -> Search instead for CNN+" -> "Did you mean: CNN?"
ZetaZero 5y ago
I didn't ever understand the value proposition here. I already get CNN thru YTTT. Or I can go to CNN.com for more choices. Why do I need to pay $$ for a different CNN source?
- tyingq 5y ago
  There's not even a single area on https://plus.cnn.com https://plus.cnn.com that would answer your question either. It doesn't even tell you it's not free, or have a pricing page either. You apparently would have to sign up for an account to see the pricing. Edit: Ah, so if you try to click play on a video, it offers just a little info "Plans start at $2.99/month for a limited time only"
- matwood 5y ago
  The other problem is cnn+ doesn't actually give you live cnn. It's additional content. I've seen some speculation it was simply a play to keep talent who are being courted by big platforms. Giving said talent an outlet to try different format shows with more freedom, etc... would help lock them in.
  - wcfields 5y ago
    > cnn+ doesn't actually give you live cnn Ok, now that's just insane.
scantron4 5y ago
Here is an article saying their total tv viewership in the demo is just 126,000 a night. (Older than the demo seems more likely to me to be people that are going to keep paying for cable and thus be less willing to substitute a streaming service, you may or may not agree. In that case it comes up to 500,000 a night.) https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2022/02/21/cnns-ratings-collapse-prime-time-down-nearly-70-in-key-demo/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2022/02/21/cnns-rat... How can they seriously think they could quadruple their current cable viewership with a paid app in a year? "expected to bring in around 2 million subscribers in the U.S. in the service's first year and 15-18 million after four years."
swframe2 5y ago
I think the problem with the news is that it focuses only on the problems; They should do some research so they can focus on presenting the solutions. I think I would subscribe to a channel that tells me how to improve the world's problems.
- sebow 5y ago
  That's only part of it. Them focusing on the problems isn't something new really (and from a financial standpoint is "understandable", as much as we hate this because it doesn't exactly benefit society that much), but the bigger problem is the fact that very often in the last decade they seemed to either lie by omitting key facts/aspects or straight out misrepresenting a story: which is something that people have began noticing, though very recently. This is not even going into the phenomenon that some outlets began popularizing the opinion-pieces to the point that their activism about certain topics began smelling too much like propaganda. Only very recently (~2019 and so imo) they started slowing down on this, but not after noticing that their pockets began hurting a lot due to their often-disingenuous journalism. Alternative journalism has grown a lot but some flaws are still there, it's not polished. Though I always tell myself if I want the truth I have to dig for it to the source, and even if misinformation is a legitimate issue, one cannot negate the fact that it's more probable that there's some raw video/information about a story that presents truth as close as possible, and is available deep in a social network or the internet.
mdoms 5y ago
CNN has spent the last 6 or 7 years transforming itself from a credible news organisation into an activist organisation. Of course this has a lower ceiling on subscriber numbers.
- seiferteric 5y ago
  I blocked CNN in ublock origin the day I went there and it had front and center something like "the biggest threat to America is white men"... I just could not take them seriously any longer.
- no_butterscotch 5y ago
  Yup same reason I don't know watch em anymore. I realized I needed to drink their Koolaid, which isn't how news should work.
godelski 5y ago
I don't get it, CNN+ looks exactly the opposite of what we need as a country. I looked at their show offerings[0] and 75% of them looked like true crime dramas. If I wanted a news source that would make me live in perpetual fear I'd go to Fox. Thinking there's a gunman around every corner is what we used to make fun of Fox viewers for (and their need to carry a weapon to respond to said gunman). Maybe it's just me, but this is the exact opposite direction CNN or any news should go. News isn't for entertainment and it shouldn't ever be. And I'm pretty sure a lot of us have been fed up with the attempts to make it so. [0] https://plus.cnn.com/ https://plus.cnn.com/
- lampshades 5y ago
  Mainstream news is basically dead. It's all for entertainment and ad revenue. There are very few journalist of any sort of integrity that exist on any of these networks. They'll be eaten by the younger upstarts that actually care to report on news and write real journalism. And then the cycle begins again (look at Vice).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- colpabar 5y ago
  >If I wanted a news source that would make me live in perpetual fear I'd go to Fox. Thinking there's a gunman around every corner is what we used to make fun of Fox viewers for (and their need to carry a weapon to respond to said gunman). Wow, you weren't kidding. I was at least expecting it to differ from fox by showing different kinds of crime, but nope - subway shootings in NYC was the first thing I saw. Who the hell would ever pay for this???
  - godelski 5y ago
    Yeah I grew up in a household that watched Fox. I saw CNN shift hard in this direction with the pandemic so shifted towards more neutral tone sources like Reuters and AP. It's honestly disgusting to me to see so much fear based content. And to be fair, I did see some non-fear based content. But the vast majority was and even some of the non-fear based stuff (maybe, I'm literally judging a show by its cover) still had those dark tones/style of posters. I cannot stress this enough. People don't watch news for the entertainment value (even if that does increase viewership, that's not why they are watching it).
ilamont 5y ago
Paywalled news apps and websites have a real problem attracting and retaining subscribers. My local news website forces you to talk to a human to cancel, and they will cut rates to the bone to keep customers. NYT does this as well, although it's an easier sell because the articles and special features are such high quality and they have really figured out the hooks and cross-sells (Cooking, Wirecutter, games, etc.) In terms of video, many well financed companies have tried to make it work and struggled, whether it's niche audiences, drama, talk, news, or whatever. From what I understand, Bloomberg TV survives only because of revenue from their terminal business. As someone else pointed out, with so many free alternatives for international news and political talk, what's the attraction of CNN+ to potential subs?
oversocialized 5y ago
wilde 5y ago
Lol. I signed up to receive an email notification when it launched and I never got it. I guess I’ll go check it out? But yeah it feels like they hired the Quibi guys.
sevenf0ur 5y ago
Anyone else think their plus logo is a misuse of the Red Cross emblem?
- williamscales 5y ago
  It’s definitely cutting it close.
TrispusAttucks 5y ago
No one needs more CNN. They're already barely held up by subsidized agreements with airports and YouTube / Twitter algorithm specifics. This was doomed to fail.
egberts1 5y ago
CNN has gotten to be too partisan and too childish for my independent taste. It’s no wonder that they are declining.

56 points by uptown 5y ago

Of course people aren't paying $6 a month for news, they really mis-calculated the audience for this. People who watch CNN already subscribe to cable (Traditional or OTT) It should've always just been an add on or included in HBO max for free to add additional value to that streaming platform. It's not too late, they could easily integrate it with HBO max to offer live news to all who subscribe.

sfblah 5y ago
My take on this was it was just a clone of the Fox News pay service. The CNN one would just be from a left-leaning perspective or some such. I bet if they market it better, it will do OK.
- downrightmike 5y ago
  Then they've missed the mark, because they aren't left, just center.
  - sfblah 5y ago
    I don't know about the leanings of CNN+, since I don't pay for it. I do know that Don Lemon and (former host) Chris Cuomo are obviously slanted left. I don't know if there's an objective way to measure this, so I just look at my own reactions, as I know I'm a moderate (my most recent presidential votes were Biden, Clinton, Romney, Obama, Bush; and I support about half of each party's political platform -- I'm pro-choice, pro-nuclear, anti-gun, anti-woke).
- dbbk 5y ago
  If you've seen anything from Chris Cillizza you wouldn't say CNN is left-leaning. Also, their major star of CNN+ is Chris Wallace who they poached from Fox News.
  - sfblah 5y ago
    That's interesting. I don't pay for CNN+, so I'm just familiar with their standard news coverage, which is definitely left-slanted.
colechristensen 5y ago
I'd pay $6 a month for actual informative content, but have you ever actually watched cable news for an extended amount of time? It's mostly just inane blathering and repeating the same thing over and over. They just don't have more than 30 minutes worth of information to share each day, but they stretch it to 24 hours. If they upped the information content, lowered the emotional appeal, and just covered a whole lot more I bet they could boost their audience...

mountainriver 5y ago

I used to really like CNN back in like 2010. Over the years its just become worse and worse to the point I don't read it anymore. It's basically turned into gossip news and is constantly skewing reality in favor of profits. I'm over it, and I think most other people are as well.

xkbarkar 5y ago
Anecdotally yeah. Agree. To me cnn is the exact same garbage as fox. Just leftist instead of rightist. I never click on any links to either media. Actually I used to line the guardian but in the past two years the quality of their reporting also just went alarmist and hyperbolic. In some cases blatantly inaccurate. Looking for a good news source currenty that arent afraid of critizicing any political party and their actions.
- oldmanhorton 5y ago
  I think Shepherd Smith on CNBC is generally pretty good. He definitely does some entertainment and "feel good" stories but for the most part there's less commentary and opinion than most other cable news.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- g42gregory 5y ago
  Jonathan Turley, Glenn Greenwald.
  - lampshades 5y ago
    > Glenn Greenwald Who is actually on Fox quite a bit these days, funnily enough. 15-25 year old me would have laughed in disbelief, but if I decide to turn on cable news these days, I turn on Fox. Edit: Also, Whitney Webb at Mint Press News is very good, just to throw her in the ring.
    - 5y ago

tyingq 5y ago

First I've heard of it, and I spend a fair amount of time watching news, mostly PBS, SkyNews, and AlJazeera. All of which I can see on my Roku without spending any money. Feels like they missed something in their marketing plan. I may have seen the little + there when skimming cnn.com at some point, but didn't understand it was some new product. But, as mentioned in the first paragraph, I don't have a strong need for a paid product at the moment anyway. Edit: Probably doesn't help that Google doesn't know what it is either...[search for cnn+] -> "Showing results for CNN -> Search instead for CNN+" -> "Did you mean: CNN?"

ZetaZero 5y ago

I didn't ever understand the value proposition here. I already get CNN thru YTTT. Or I can go to CNN.com for more choices. Why do I need to pay $$ for a different CNN source?

tyingq 5y ago
There's not even a single area on https://plus.cnn.com https://plus.cnn.com that would answer your question either. It doesn't even tell you it's not free, or have a pricing page either. You apparently would have to sign up for an account to see the pricing. Edit: Ah, so if you try to click play on a video, it offers just a little info "Plans start at $2.99/month for a limited time only"
matwood 5y ago
The other problem is cnn+ doesn't actually give you live cnn. It's additional content. I've seen some speculation it was simply a play to keep talent who are being courted by big platforms. Giving said talent an outlet to try different format shows with more freedom, etc... would help lock them in.
- wcfields 5y ago
  > cnn+ doesn't actually give you live cnn Ok, now that's just insane.

scantron4 5y ago

Here is an article saying their total tv viewership in the demo is just 126,000 a night. (Older than the demo seems more likely to me to be people that are going to keep paying for cable and thus be less willing to substitute a streaming service, you may or may not agree. In that case it comes up to 500,000 a night.) https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2022/02/21/cnns-ratings-collapse-prime-time-down-nearly-70-in-key-demo/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2022/02/21/cnns-rat... How can they seriously think they could quadruple their current cable viewership with a paid app in a year? "expected to bring in around 2 million subscribers in the U.S. in the service's first year and 15-18 million after four years."

swframe2 5y ago

I think the problem with the news is that it focuses only on the problems; They should do some research so they can focus on presenting the solutions. I think I would subscribe to a channel that tells me how to improve the world's problems.

sebow 5y ago
That's only part of it. Them focusing on the problems isn't something new really (and from a financial standpoint is "understandable", as much as we hate this because it doesn't exactly benefit society that much), but the bigger problem is the fact that very often in the last decade they seemed to either lie by omitting key facts/aspects or straight out misrepresenting a story: which is something that people have began noticing, though very recently. This is not even going into the phenomenon that some outlets began popularizing the opinion-pieces to the point that their activism about certain topics began smelling too much like propaganda. Only very recently (~2019 and so imo) they started slowing down on this, but not after noticing that their pockets began hurting a lot due to their often-disingenuous journalism. Alternative journalism has grown a lot but some flaws are still there, it's not polished. Though I always tell myself if I want the truth I have to dig for it to the source, and even if misinformation is a legitimate issue, one cannot negate the fact that it's more probable that there's some raw video/information about a story that presents truth as close as possible, and is available deep in a social network or the internet.

mdoms 5y ago

CNN has spent the last 6 or 7 years transforming itself from a credible news organisation into an activist organisation. Of course this has a lower ceiling on subscriber numbers.

seiferteric 5y ago
I blocked CNN in ublock origin the day I went there and it had front and center something like "the biggest threat to America is white men"... I just could not take them seriously any longer.
no_butterscotch 5y ago
Yup same reason I don't know watch em anymore. I realized I needed to drink their Koolaid, which isn't how news should work.

godelski 5y ago

I don't get it, CNN+ looks exactly the opposite of what we need as a country. I looked at their show offerings[0] and 75% of them looked like true crime dramas. If I wanted a news source that would make me live in perpetual fear I'd go to Fox. Thinking there's a gunman around every corner is what we used to make fun of Fox viewers for (and their need to carry a weapon to respond to said gunman). Maybe it's just me, but this is the exact opposite direction CNN or any news should go. News isn't for entertainment and it shouldn't ever be. And I'm pretty sure a lot of us have been fed up with the attempts to make it so. [0] https://plus.cnn.com/ https://plus.cnn.com/

lampshades 5y ago
Mainstream news is basically dead. It's all for entertainment and ad revenue. There are very few journalist of any sort of integrity that exist on any of these networks. They'll be eaten by the younger upstarts that actually care to report on news and write real journalism. And then the cycle begins again (look at Vice).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
colpabar 5y ago
>If I wanted a news source that would make me live in perpetual fear I'd go to Fox. Thinking there's a gunman around every corner is what we used to make fun of Fox viewers for (and their need to carry a weapon to respond to said gunman). Wow, you weren't kidding. I was at least expecting it to differ from fox by showing different kinds of crime, but nope - subway shootings in NYC was the first thing I saw. Who the hell would ever pay for this???
- godelski 5y ago
  Yeah I grew up in a household that watched Fox. I saw CNN shift hard in this direction with the pandemic so shifted towards more neutral tone sources like Reuters and AP. It's honestly disgusting to me to see so much fear based content. And to be fair, I did see some non-fear based content. But the vast majority was and even some of the non-fear based stuff (maybe, I'm literally judging a show by its cover) still had those dark tones/style of posters. I cannot stress this enough. People don't watch news for the entertainment value (even if that does increase viewership, that's not why they are watching it).

ilamont 5y ago

Paywalled news apps and websites have a real problem attracting and retaining subscribers. My local news website forces you to talk to a human to cancel, and they will cut rates to the bone to keep customers. NYT does this as well, although it's an easier sell because the articles and special features are such high quality and they have really figured out the hooks and cross-sells (Cooking, Wirecutter, games, etc.) In terms of video, many well financed companies have tried to make it work and struggled, whether it's niche audiences, drama, talk, news, or whatever. From what I understand, Bloomberg TV survives only because of revenue from their terminal business. As someone else pointed out, with so many free alternatives for international news and political talk, what's the attraction of CNN+ to potential subs?

oversocialized 5y ago

wilde 5y ago

Lol. I signed up to receive an email notification when it launched and I never got it. I guess I’ll go check it out? But yeah it feels like they hired the Quibi guys.

sevenf0ur 5y ago

Anyone else think their plus logo is a misuse of the Red Cross emblem?

williamscales 5y ago
It’s definitely cutting it close.

TrispusAttucks 5y ago

No one needs more CNN. They're already barely held up by subsidized agreements with airports and YouTube / Twitter algorithm specifics. This was doomed to fail.

egberts1 5y ago

CNN has gotten to be too partisan and too childish for my independent taste. It’s no wonder that they are declining.