• CBS issued a statement Thursday publicly defending its cancellation of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert for the first time, disclosing that the show lost approximately $40 million a year — and that Byron Allen’s replacement arrangement will swing the timeslot to a $15 million annual profit
• Allen is operating under a “time buy” model: he pays CBS $15 million per year to lease the 11:30 PM hour and sells his own ad inventory; his show Comics Unleashed premiered May 22, the night after Colbert’s series finale
• Colbert’s finale on May 21 drew 6.7 million viewers — the show’s most-watched weeknight episode in its history; Comics Unleashed debuted to approximately 995,000 total viewers and 116,000 in the 18–49 demo
• CBS has faced weeks of speculation that the cancellation was politically motivated; the network’s statement called the move a response to a “cost prohibitive” business model rather than a political decision

CBS broke its silence Thursday on one of the more controversial decisions in late-night television in years: the cancellation of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. For the first time, the network put numbers to the story. The Late Show was losing roughly $40 million a year, CBS said — a figure that had been widely circulated but never confirmed. Under the new arrangement, Byron Allen leases the 11:30 PM timeslot from CBS for $15 million annually and sells his own advertising, flipping the math from a $40 million annual loss to a projected $15 million profit, per Deadline.

“We’re proud to partner with Byron Allen on a new business and programming model for late night that proactively addresses a network daypart that was cost prohibitive to continue,” CBS said in its statement. The network has been under pressure since the cancellation was announced, with critics and commentators questioning whether politics played a role in ousting Colbert, whose show had a distinctly liberal sensibility. CBS did not address the political speculation directly, framing the move purely as a financial one, per Variety.

The Numbers After Colbert

The scale of the audience drop is hard to ignore. Colbert’s May 21 series finale drew 6.7 million viewers — the most-watched weeknight episode in the show’s history. Comics Unleashed, which premiered the following night on May 22, opened to approximately 995,000 total viewers and 116,000 in the 18–49 demo, according to LateNighter citing initial Nielsen Live+Same Day panel data, per TV Insider. Allen has been direct about not trying to recapture Colbert’s audience — he told outlets he has no interest in political humor and is building something different.

Allen, 65, is a Detroit-born billionaire who started his career in stand-up comedy and built a media empire over decades. His Comics Unleashed has been a syndicated panel comedy format for years, and the CBS slot gives it a prime broadcast home. Whether that audience finds him is a question the next few weeks of ratings data will start to answer, per The Hollywood Reporter.

The post CBS Says the Late Show Was Losing $40 Million a Year — Now Byron Allen’s Time Buy Will Turn a $15M Profit appeared first on Cream.

• Byron Allen’s Comics Unleashed takes over Stephen Colbert’s 11:35 p.m. CBS time slot starting Friday, May 22
• Allen is paying CBS for the time slot and handling all ad sales himself, saving the network an estimated $150–$170 million annually
• He specifically chose May 22 to honor his hero Johnny Carson, whose final Tonight Show aired exactly 34 years earlier
• Allen promises zero politics — \”You come, you laugh\” — in a deliberate departure from Colbert’s format
• The deal is part of a sweeping media expansion that also includes a controlling stake in BuzzFeed and ambitions to acquire Starz

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When CBS announced it was canceling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Byron Allen didn’t mourn. He picked up the phone.

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\”I said, ‘OK, do you like money?’\” Allen recalled this week. \”They said, ‘Yes!’\”

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Starting Friday, May 22, Allen’s long-running syndicated comedy series Comics Unleashed takes over the 11:35 p.m. ET slot on CBS — one of the most storied windows in American television — with back-to-back half-hour episodes. That’s followed by two more half-hours of his comedy game show Funny You Should Ask, hosted by Jon Kelley, running through 1:37 a.m. Both shows will also be available to Paramount+ Premium subscribers through their local CBS affiliate feed.

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Colbert’s final episode airs Thursday, May 21. By Friday night, the era is over — and Allen’s begins.

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The Deal That Saved CBS $150 Million

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The math behind this arrangement is striking. Under the deal, Allen leases the two-hour block from CBS and sells all the advertising inventory himself. He wouldn’t disclose exactly what he’s paying the network, but he was direct about what CBS is getting out of it: relief from a massive financial burden.

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\”Between the two time periods, they’re saving approximately $150 million-plus per year, just on production and marketing,\” Allen explained. \”And that does not include what I’m paying for the time slot. So it’s a great deal for CBS.\”

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CBS had been spending roughly that amount producing both The Late Show and the show that followed it, Taylor Tomlinson’s After Midnight. When the network decided to cancel both, Allen’s pitch was essentially: don’t replace them with anything. Let me take it off your hands entirely.

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\”I said, ‘Save your money. I will put my show Comics Unleashed on,’\” he told CBS Mornings this week. \”They said, ‘This is a great idea, you’re going to save us $150 to $170 million.’\”

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He put it more colorfully in another interview: \”I am a gift from the money gods and the comedy gods.\”

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The context matters here. Broadcast networks are under serious financial strain — sports rights are expensive, and advertising dollars are migrating fast from linear TV to digital. Allen knows this firsthand. Through Allen Media Group, he has invested roughly a billion dollars acquiring ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox affiliates across 11 U.S. markets, plus the Weather Channel and other properties. He’s watched the economics shift in real time. CBS’s late-night costs had become, in his view, an unnecessary burden in a landscape that no longer justified them.

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\”No Politics. You Come, You Laugh.\”

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The tonal shift from Colbert to Allen is going to be significant — and Allen is leaning into it.

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When CBS Mornings co-host Adriana Diaz asked him directly whether Comics Unleashed would get political, Allen didn’t hesitate: \”No, no, no, no politics. That’s it. You come, you laugh.\”

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He added: \”I want to bring people together using comedy. I’m going to appeal to all.\” The show, he said, has featured more than a thousand comedians across twenty years — \”every shape and size, you name it\” — and the format stays squarely focused on funny. \”We’re doing a show with nothing political, racist, sexist or homophobic… just clean comedy,\” he told Variety.

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That’s a pointed contrast to Colbert’s Late Show, which became one of late-night’s most politically charged programs. The show’s cancellation came just days after Colbert publicly criticized CBS parent company Paramount for its $16 million settlement with President Donald Trump — a decision that landed while Paramount was in the middle of a merger with Skydance Media requiring Trump administration approval. CBS called the cancellation \”purely a financial decision,\” but the timing drew intense scrutiny, and figures like David Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel were vocal in their criticism of the network.

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Allen has been careful to thread the needle. He and Colbert are friends, and he made that clear. \”I think it was a very unfortunate event,\” he said on CBS Mornings. \”I love Stephen Colbert. I’m a big fan. Once they made the decision, I said, ‘OK, this isn’t show business, this is business show.’ I absolutely love Colbert, and I would do anything — he doesn’t need me — but I would do anything to support him.\”

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In a separate interview, he went further: \”I really like Stephen Colbert. I think he is a magnificent human being. He’s a super talent. I believe he is an American treasure.\”

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Even Letterman, who was critical of CBS’s decision, offered something close to a grudging endorsement of Allen’s format. On The Barbara Gaines Show in April, he said: \”The show is a pretty good idea. It’s all panel. Nobody’s doing any stand-up except they’re seated doing stand-up.\”

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The Night He Watched Johnny Carson and Decided Everything

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Here’s what makes Allen’s May 22 launch date more than just a scheduling choice.

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CBS had originally wanted him to premiere on September 21. Allen said no. He pushed for May 22 specifically because it marks the 34th anniversary of Johnny Carson’s final night hosting The Tonight Show — May 22, 1992.

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\”What people don’t realize is that was my hero Johnny Carson’s last night,\” Allen said. \”Normally, you would premiere in September, but I said, ‘No, no, no, no. That’s when Johnny stepped down. That’s when I’m stepping up.’\”

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That connection to Carson runs deep — and it starts in childhood. Allen’s mother, who had him when she was just 17, worked at NBC and couldn’t afford childcare. So she brought young Byron to the lot in Burbank, where he’d wait for her to finish her shift while watching Carson tape his show.

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\”I’ve said to myself, what a wonderful way to go through life, making people laugh,\” Allen recalled.

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In 1979, the circle started to close. Allen got to perform stand-up on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, becoming the youngest comedian ever to appear on the program. He was a teenager.

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\”I was thinking to myself, in the next five minutes I’m going to change my life and my mother’s life forever,\” he said. \”So I’m going to go out there and have a great time, and after I make these people laugh, we’re never going to worry about a bowl of cereal again.\”

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Now, nearly five decades later, he’s inherited the slot Carson helped define. He said he plans to open that first episode on Friday with a moment of acknowledgment: \”I will take a minute to share some thoughts about late night and what we’re doing.\”

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\”It makes me feel great, because at the end of the day, all I want to do is make my mama proud, no matter how rich I get,\” Allen said. \”I’m just still a little scared little boy hanging on to my mother’s leg.\”

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The Bigger Empire Allen Is Building

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The CBS deal is just one piece of a much larger expansion Allen is engineering right now.

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Last week, he acquired a 52% controlling stake in BuzzFeed — paying $20 million in cash upfront plus $100 million in a promissory note due in five years. When the deal closes, expected by the end of May, Allen becomes BuzzFeed’s chairman and CEO, with co-founder Jonah Peretti moving to a president of BuzzFeed AI role. BuzzFeed, once valued at $1.7 billion, had recently warned investors it had \”substantial doubt\” about its ability to continue as a going concern, posting a net loss of $57.3 million in 2025 on revenue of $185.3 million.

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Allen’s plan is to turn BuzzFeed and HuffPost into streaming brands, anchored by his Weather Channel-owned Local Now platform, which ingests roughly 500,000 pieces of video per day and provides hyper-localized news, weather, sports, and traffic content. He wants user-generated content, revenue-sharing with creators, and no paywalls.

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\”We are chasing YouTube,\” he said plainly. \”The two best words in media: ‘free’ and ‘streaming.’ Bring it together and, poof, you’ve got something magical.\”

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He was characteristically blunt about why the BuzzFeed deal made sense: \”It was definitely a distressed sale — without a doubt. They told the world they were about to run out of money! When a company is lying on its back, you can’t fall off the floor.\”

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Then there’s Starz. In March, Allen’s investment arm acquired a 10.7% stake in the premium cable network for $25 million — making him the second-largest stockholder. Starz responded almost immediately by adopting a “poison pill” shareholder rights plan, which allows existing investors to buy shares at a 50% discount if any single investor crosses 17.5% ownership — a move widely understood as a defense against Allen.

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He’s not deterred. \”The poison pill, that was a stupid move. They didn’t need to do that,\” he said. \”When I decide to buy them, I will do a lot more than what they’re doing now — I can make Starz infinitely bigger.\”

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Allen has a history of ambitious media bids that didn’t close — a $30 billion play for Paramount Global, a $3.5 billion offer for BET, a run at TV station operator Tegna, and a reported interest in the NFL’s Washington Commanders. But at 65, with a CBS time slot, a BuzzFeed acquisition, and a Starz stake on the books, he’s building something that looks increasingly like a real empire — one comedy block at a time.

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Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen premieres Friday, May 22, at 11:35 p.m. ET on CBS.

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“category”: “TV

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• Byron Allen’s family office, Allen Family Digital, is acquiring a 52% majority stake in BuzzFeed for $120 million
• Allen will become Chairman and CEO; founder Jonah Peretti steps down after 20 years to lead a new BuzzFeed AI division
• The deal — structured as $20M cash plus a $100M promissory note — pulled BuzzFeed back from the brink of bankruptcy
• BuzzFeed stock more than doubled on the news, surging over 113% to around $1.60 on Tuesday
• Allen plans to pivot BuzzFeed toward free streaming video, audio, and user-generated content, directly targeting YouTube

Byron Allen is taking over BuzzFeed. The media mogul’s family office, Allen Family Digital, has agreed to acquire a 52% controlling stake in the struggling digital publisher for $120 million — a deal that hands Allen the chairman and CEO title and ends Jonah Peretti’s nearly two-decade run as the company’s founder and chief executive.

BuzzFeed stock exploded on the news, surging more than 113% to around $1.60 on Tuesday — a year-to-date high — after shares had closed Monday’s regular session at just 73 cents. Volume hit 61 million shares, dwarfing the stock’s average daily volume of roughly 360,000. For a company that was openly warning investors about its ability to stay afloat, it was a dramatic reversal.

The transaction values BuzzFeed shares at $3 each — more than four times Monday’s closing price — and is structured as $20 million in cash at closing plus a $100 million promissory note due five years out, accruing interest at 5% annually. The deal is expected to close by the end of May, subject to customary conditions.

A Lifeline for a Company on the Edge

The timing couldn’t be more critical. Earlier this month, BuzzFeed disclosed it had missed a $5 million debt payment due at the end of April and had moved to extend that deadline to May 18. The company had been openly warning investors about severe liquidity issues — operating with minimal cash against $58.4 million in debt while facing the threat of a Nasdaq delisting after shares fell below the $1 threshold. It had received a similar delisting warning in 2023 and resorted to a reverse stock split to stay listed.

Without Allen’s investment, bankruptcy appeared to be the likely next chapter. The company’s market cap heading into Monday was roughly $28 million. Allen’s deal values the business at more than three times that.

The Q1 2026 numbers reported alongside the deal announcement didn’t offer much comfort on their own: revenue fell 12.4% year-over-year to $31.6 million, advertising revenue dropped nearly 20%, and net losses widened to $15.1 million from $12.5 million in the same quarter a year ago. Adjusted EBITDA came in at negative $7.8 million. The company exited the quarter with just $6.8 million in cash.

But investors weren’t focused on the rearview mirror. They were focused on what Allen brings to the table.

Who Is Byron Allen — and What Does He Want With BuzzFeed?

Allen founded Allen Media Group in 1993 and has built it into one of the largest independent media companies in the country. He owns 13 ABC, CBS, and NBC network affiliate TV stations across 11 U.S. markets, plus 10 24-hour HD television networks — including The Weather Channel — serving nearly 275 million subscribers. He also owns digital streaming platforms and is one of the largest independent producers of first-run syndicated television programming in the business.

He’s also about to become a late-night presence: Allen Media Group’s Comics Unleashed is set to take over The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’s time slot on CBS when Colbert’s run ends later this month.

Allen has spent years pursuing bigger acquisitions — he previously made bids tied to Paramount Global, BET, and Tegna — but none of those deals came together. BuzzFeed represents something different: a distressed but iconic digital brand he can acquire at a fraction of its former value and reshape on his own terms.

And he’s not being subtle about what he wants to do with it. “Our vision is to build on the iconic foundation of BuzzFeed and HuffPost by expanding into free-streaming video, audio and user-generated content,” Allen said in the announcement. “As of this moment, with the power of AI, BuzzFeed is officially chasing YouTube to become another premiere free video streaming service.”

That’s a bold swing for a company that, until yesterday, was struggling to make payroll.

The End of the Peretti Era

Jonah Peretti co-founded BuzzFeed in 2006 and turned it into one of the defining media brands of the social internet era — pioneering viral content, social distribution, and the quiz format that once made the whole internet stop what it was doing to find out which Disney princess they were. At its peak in 2016, BuzzFeed raised $200 million from NBCUniversal at a $1.7 billion valuation. In 2013, Disney reportedly offered $650 million for the company, an offer Peretti turned down.

The years since haven’t been kind. BuzzFeed went public via SPAC in 2021, took on heavy debt to acquire Complex Networks for around $300 million, then spent the following years selling off assets — Complex, First We Feast — and shuttering its award-winning news operation, BuzzFeed News, in 2023. HuffPost, acquired from Verizon Media in 2020, remained. So did Tasty, the food brand. But the company’s stock had lost more than 98% of its value before Monday’s rally.

Peretti, for his part, is framing his exit from the CEO role as a move he’s genuinely excited about. “I’m confident I can have a bigger impact and create more value in this new capacity,” he said on a conference call Monday, per the New York Times, adding that stepping down would allow him to play “a more hands-on role developing products and technology.”

In a formal statement, Peretti was effusive about his successor: “Byron Allen has built one of the world’s largest media companies and is one of the most accomplished media entrepreneurs in the industry, having spent 30-plus years transforming distribution infrastructure, identifying strategic assets, and scaling them into something much greater. Byron’s vision, operational experience, and long-term commitment to premium content makes him exceptionally well-positioned to lead BuzzFeed and HuffPost into our next phase of growth.”

He added a personal note that says a lot about the moment: “And personally, I’m thrilled Byron is taking over ‘The Late Show With Stephen Colbert’s’ time slot, and highly confident that his relationships with talent will bring some incredible stars to the BuzzFeed platform.”

As President of BuzzFeed AI, Peretti will focus on applied AI research, product innovation, and what the company describes as “technology-driven media formats.” It’s worth noting that BuzzFeed’s previous AI pivot — which included AI-generated quizzes and articles — drew significant criticism and didn’t move the needle financially. Whether Peretti can make the strategy work in a new capacity remains an open question.

What’s Getting Restructured

Alongside the Allen deal, BuzzFeed announced a round of cost reductions and a structural change: BuzzFeed Studios — which produces vertical micro-dramas, animation, digital video, and premium studio content including feature films — along with the Tasty food brand will be spun off into a new independent entity. The company hasn’t offered many specifics on that spinoff yet.

Allen will oversee both BuzzFeed and HuffPost after the transaction closes, with his eyes set on the streaming opportunity. The incoming CEO’s track record in broadcast and his existing relationships across the television industry give BuzzFeed something it hasn’t had in a while: an operator who knows how to build and distribute content at scale.

Whether that’s enough to resurrect one of the internet’s most recognizable names — and whether BZFD stock at $1.60 represents a real turnaround story or just a momentary spike — Wall Street’s only analyst covering the stock currently has a price target of $1, implying meaningful downside from current levels. The stock is still trading more than 95% below its March 2021 peak.

But for a company that was staring down bankruptcy a week ago, even getting to ask that question feels like progress.

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