Has The Late Show with Stephen Colbert turned a profit since its 2015 debut?

1. The show’s ratings and prestige—strong, not synonymous with profit

Stephen Colbert’s Late Show debuted in September 2015 and built a long run of ratings dominance, remaining the highest-rated American late-night talk show for nine consecutive seasons as of 2025, a streak that underlines audience relevance even as the business model shifted ^[1]; ratings leadership, however, is not the same as profitability because advertising rates, affiliate economics, production costs and corporate strategy all feed the profit equation, and those other factors weakened over the period ^{[1] [4]}.

2. Reporting from inside the industry: losses before cancellation

Multiple investigative reports concluded that the Late Show was losing substantial sums for CBS in the run-up to its 2025 cancellation, with The New York Times quoting sources who said the program was “losing tens of millions of dollars a year” and CBS executives framing the decision as financial ^[2]; that characterization was echoed in contemporaneous industry coverage that said the network could not see a path to profitability amid a streaming-dominant entertainment market ^[4].

3. Streaming revenue helped but didn’t erase losses

Parrot Analytics’ and TheWrap’s analysis estimated the show generated just under $60 million in streaming subscriber value to Paramount+ in the U.S. and Canada from 2021–Q1 2025, a meaningful contribution but one that industry analysts and the network apparently judged insufficient to offset linear-advertising declines and production costs ^{[5] [6]}; this streaming tally also trailed some peers, which fed arguments that the show under-monetized its viewers on digital platforms ^[5].

4. The wider late-night economics angle—an industry in retreat

Independent analysts and trade reporting show the economics of network late-night eroded sharply: broadcast late-night ad revenue fell from hundreds of millions in prior years to roughly half by the mid-2020s, and an analyst who studied the space concluded that by 2022–2023 network late-night talk shows had likely ceased to be broadly profitable—context that makes a formerly successful program’s financial shortfalls less an indictment of talent than of the business model ^{[3] [4]}.

5. Conflicting numbers, political narratives, and the limits of public evidence

Claims that CBS was losing exactly $40–50 million annually circulated widely and were used in partisan debates about whether Colbert’s politics or corporate consolidation drove the cancellation, but advocacy groups and fact-checkers urged caution about anonymous-source figures and the precision of the loss estimates ^{[7] [8]}; reporters from Puck, The New York Post and others amplified dollar amounts from unnamed insiders, while skeptics noted that the company’s official public disclosures and the granular P&L under CBS remain private, leaving room for different interpretations ^{[2] [7]}.

6. Bottom line and reporting limits

The best available reporting shows The Late Show generated strong ratings and some streaming revenue but, according to multiple industry and inside sources, was operating at a loss—described as “tens of millions” annually—by the time CBS decided to end the program, and analysts say that declining linear ad revenues made profitability across network late-night unlikely after 2022 ^{[1] [2] [3]}; however, because CBS/Paramount have not released an auditable, line-by-line public profit-and-loss for the show, an exact cumulative profit/loss number for Colbert’s run since 2015 cannot be independently verified from the available sources ^{[2] [7]}.