Once upon a time, MSNBC was the crown jewel of progressive media, a cable empire drawing millions of loyal viewers by selling a steady stream of anti-conservative narratives. In its glory days during November 2020, the network averaged 2.6 million primetime viewers, the highest in its history, riding a wave of Trump-versus-Biden hysteria.
Yet that period of cultural dominance and advertising gold have long since vanished. What remains is a network rebranded as “MS NOW,” struggling to stay solvent and increasingly cut off from the very resources that once allowed it to punch above its weight.
The unraveling has been swift. By 2022, MSNBC’s primetime audience had already dropped by 25 percent from 2021 highs, falling to just 1.2 million viewers. That collapse brought with it steep ad revenue losses, costing NBCUniversal’s news division hundreds of millions. The writing was on the wall: trendy ideological programming might stir a base, but it alienates advertisers and broader audiences.
By 2023, the network’s primetime audience hovered around 1.22 million, a mere shadow of its 2020 glory, with total-day viewership stuck below 800,000. Despite fleeting bumps during election cycles, MSNBC had already become a financial liability.
The downfall accelerated after Trump’s 2024 victory. Ratings nosedived as disillusioned viewers fled the echo chamber. In the first quarter of 2025, primetime ratings sank to 1.024 million, an 18 percent year-over-year decline, with total-day audiences cratering 27 percent to 593,000. Such hemorrhaging translated into staggering losses, with projections estimating NBCUniversal’s cable news arm bleeding over half a billion dollars annually.
The network’s response was desperate cost-cutting. In January 2025, MSNBC initiated layoffs affecting around 75 employees across divisions. The following month, nearly 100 union staffers from flagship shows like The Rachel Maddow Show were let go. Joy Reid was shown the door as The ReidOut collapsed under abysmal ratings.
By late February, 99 more WGA East members were forced to reapply for their own jobs as part of another restructuring. These cuts underscored what had become obvious: MSNBC was shedding both talent and credibility in a futile bid to shore up its books.
Leadership churn added to the chaos. In January, MSNBC president Rashida Jones stepped down after four turbulent years, with Rebecca Kutler stepping in as interim leader. Just days later, the network announced a renewed emphasis on Rachel Maddow as its central figure, despite viewership still collapsing. Once a sign of cultural dominance, Maddow’s prominence now symbolized a network trapped in the past, unable to escape its dependence on ideological comfort food for the left.
Image from Grok.
The financial strain was exacerbated by structural shifts. In August, MSNBC dropped the iconic peacock logo. This was part of its rebranding into MS NOW—“My Source for News, Opinion, and the World”—ahead of its spinoff into Comcast’s Versant unit. That necessitates the severance of ties with NBC News resources.
Stripped of NBC’s newsgathering backbone, the network is left intellectually adrift and economically exposed. To compensate, MS NOW inked a deal with Sky News for international coverage in September; a patchwork fix highlighting its desperation.
The numbers paint the full picture. In May, primetime viewership sank to 877,000, a 24 percent drop from the prior year, while total-day audiences fell 33 percent to just 545,000. The debut of a new primetime lineup that same month only worsened the disaster, with ratings plunging further; down 24 percent year-over-year in primetime and 33 percent in total-day performance.
Without NBCUniversal’s vast infrastructure to cushion the blow, MS NOW—succeeding the last remnants of MSNBC on October 6—must scrape by in a brutally competitive, cord-cutting marketplace.
The trajectory traces back more than a decade. As early as 2014, MSNBC’s revenue had already declined by 5 percent year-over-year to roughly $450 million as its pivot toward progressive commentary drove advertisers away. By 2022, profits across NBCUniversal’s news group plummeted, dragged down by MSNBC’s narrow ideological appeal.
By 2023, ad revenue stagnated at about $255 million, a fraction of its past performance, underscoring the network’s economic fragility. The downward spiral only accelerated in 2024, when NBCUniversal’s cable networks reported a 7.8 percent revenue decline, with MSNBC singled out as an underperformer.
Now, as Comcast spins MSNBC into Versant, the standalone operation is expected to shoulder heavy losses despite inheriting a $7 billion revenue pool across its sibling channels. The numbers no longer work. The ideology-first business model has collapsed under its own weight.
MSNBC is the purest case study of “get woke, go broke.” The network that once fancied itself the citadel of progressive pop culture now faces impending nonexistence. Its trendy echo-chamber model has proven not only intellectually bankrupt but financially unsustainable. Cut off from NBC’s resources, burdened by plunging ratings, and abandoned by advertisers, MS NOW represents the fate awaiting media empires that mistake partisan fervor for a sustainable business plan.
Dr. Joseph Ford Cotto hosts and produces News Sight, speaking the data-driven truth about economic and political issues that impact you. During the 2024 presidential election, he created the Five-Point Forecast, which correctly predicted Trump’s national victory and the outcome in all swing states. The author of numerous nonfiction books, Cotto holds a doctorate in business administration and is a Lean Six Sigma Certified Black Belt. During 2014, HLM King Kigeli V of Rwanda bestowed a hereditary knighthood upon him. It was followed by a barony the next year.
Image: MSNBC logo.