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Comment by joshbaptiste | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why CNN+ was dropped so quickly I haven't heard of it until the pullback

>I haven't heard of it until the pullback

That's basically the reason. CNN dumped a bunch of resources into it without really identifying what audience or demand CNN+ is trying to satisfy.

IMO there's a huge untapped market: Millennials and younger who have never in their lives paid for cable TV.

Fox news IIRC airs their shows live on Youtube, but MSNBC (eg, maddow) doesn't, so I wind up having to find some pirated stream on a janky ad-spammed site to watch the news live. Or, w/Maddow wait for her podcast to drop around midnight.

Being television I'm sure it's some contractual thing with the tv networks as to why there aren't more free/cheap/easy news streaming options. It'd be nice if there were, I think that'd get younger people much more engaged in politics. Also the fact that it's so easy to get OAN/Fox and difficult to get the other side...

Victim of the merge is my guess. There is Discovery+ and HBO Max. Having 3 probably seemed dumb to them and are probably already in motion to have a single streaming service. It was probably easier to out right kill it than to spend the resources to merge the users into something else.

Axios article today, with a fair bit of depth, discusses the events/timeline etc:

https://www.axios.com/cnn-plus-discovery-zucker-zaslav-fc031...

I think it shows the importance of leadership and vision in a new endeavor. When the CEO who was pro CNN+ had to quit because of a relationship, CNN+ lost its vision right at a crucial time.

Hard to know if it would have ultimately made any difference, but it certainly was a negative.

300m marketing budget for less than 10k users.

Math?

Technically speaking, less than 10,000 daily active users, even though total user count was between 100,000 and 150,000. However, all those first month subscribers got a discounted plan of $2.99/mo. instead of $5.99/mo., for life.

The math is terrible. They probably didn't even make enough money to buy even half of a house in San Fran, despite $300 million spent in questionable ways (Chris Wallace gets a $9 million contract?? He's laughing his head off all the way to the bank.)

> Chris Wallace gets a $9 million contract?? He's laughing his head off all the way to the bank.

I've seen rumors that he is livid. I think the type of personality that takes that job wants to be seen and heard - it's not just about money. He's likely plenty rich as is.

Because it was a spectacular failure, and with CNN's parent company changing ownership earlier this month, the new people in charge had no desire to dump more money into something that isn't going to pan out.

Yeah the guy spearheading it left and everyone else could not wait to get rid of it.

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