In June of 2021, I brought attention to Nickelodeon’s collapsing cable ratings while I was writing for Pirates and Princesses. At the time, I was covering a situation involving dislikes for a particular YouTube video from Nickelodeon. The topic was (and is) contentious, but after laying dormant for much of this year, I thought I’d take a look at how Nick’s ratings situation has changed.
What I found is that Nickelodeon is continuing to drop in ratings, and it may spell bad news for its parent company, Viacom CBS.
In October, 2021, Nickelodeon began dropping below 300,000 viewers as an average for the first time in modern cable history. When I covered this topic in June, Nick was still pulling in more than 360,000 viewers — and that was considered a collapse. It represented far more than half of Nickelodeon’s audience having left the channel since 2017, when Nickelodeon was a powerful cable news channel for children. At that time, Nickelodeon was topping 1.3 million viewers on average! Now, Nick has dropped another 50,000 viewers in just four months.
Official Nickelodeon Ratings via Cable Rankings
Now, you might be thinking that those viewers are moving to Paramount+ instead. After all, the future is streaming, if it isn’t already. But a survey of Paramount+ numbers shows that service is also lagging badly behind.
Despite having moved CBS All Access to Paramount+ (including its subscribers), Paramount+ has only managed a paltry 36 millions subscribers in its first seven months. When you consider the subscribers that came from CBS All Access — which we don’t have numbers for — it’s easy to see that Paramount+ is having anemic growth. This is especially true in comparison to Disney+ and Netflix, which dwarf the streaming service from Viacom CBS. This is probably whey Paramount+ numbers are almost always bundled with Showtime streaming services so that they can say 42 million subscribers have adopted their streaming apps.
So where are the viewers going, and why is there a loss of interest in Nickelodeon, the driving force for Paramount+?
Well… it doesn’t seem the interest is gone. After all, Nickelodeon All-Stars Brawl was the top game on Steam after release, and seems to have performed exceedingly well in sales despite a dearth of content due to a small budget. That would seem to indicate people are still very interested in aspects of Nickelodeon. It would make sense, then, for Viacom CBS to dive headfirst into the NIcktoon nostalgia and stay away from anything that might keep viewers off their services. If that doesn’t occur, they risk never catching up to Disney+, whose service nearly triples Paramount+. And that’s not even to mention Netflix that dominates both in subscribers.
Let us know in the comments below why you feel Nickelodeon and Paramount+ have come up so short in comparison to their competitors. And make sure to keep checking out That Park Place!
