Joe Flint, writing for The Wall Street Journal:

“The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” was profitable as recently as a few years ago.

Now, it loses about $40 million a year, according to a person familiar with its budget. On Thursday, CBS pulled the plug on the show and an entire franchise launched in 1993, making it the biggest casualty yet among late-night talk shows contending with cord-cutting, changing tastes among younger viewers and declining ad revenue.

I know online sentiment has largely steered towards the idea that CBS parent company Paramount canceled the show to please Trump, but that just doesn’t add up. Sure, the optics are bad. Know what’s worse? The financial situation with Colbert’s show. Late-night shows are a challenged genre, a relic of linear television, and this has been a long time coming.

When you combine an estimated per-episode cost of $625,000 with declining ad revenue this is where you end up. If you shift your focus to online views (which means even more ad revenue) Stephen Colbert only has 10 million subscribers on YouTube. Compare that number to 20 million for Jimmy Kimmel, and 32 million for Jimmy Fallon. Seth Meyers only has 5 million subscribers, and his show has already experienced budget cuts.

This may be the end of Colbert on CBS, but I am fairly certain we will see him shift to a new home in the very near future.