CNN learns the hard way that no one likes them

I don’t know who thought anyone on the planet wanted more Brian Stelter, let alone thought people would pay for it, but the launch has been a disaster. No one cares. There isn’t a cable system in the country that doesn’t offer CNN and it regularly can’t pull in 1 million viewers in prime time when it’s free. Five dollars per month isn’t a lot of money, but who would pay for home delivery of a meal from a restaurant you absolutely hate? No one.

Only 10,000 people – a rounding error of the population of the country, not to mention the world – tune into the service at any given time. You have to wonder why anyone would bother producing live content for a service so few people are watching.

CNN+ got a lot of press, free publicity for their launch. The New York Times and Washington Post have a lot of staff who are also paid contributors to CNN and many more staffers who’d love to be one day, so they were happy to plug it.