Apologies if this isn't the right community for a text post, but I wasn't sure where else to put this. I also apologize if this is a bit haphazard.
I posted originally about Kimmel getting the axe from ABC: https://lemmy.world/post/36079527
I'm angry about that. Very angry. I see a lot of people cancelling Hulu/D+ over it. I think it's a good step. But it got me thinking, how much farther can we go with it? Disney is a massive corporation that has revenue streams from a lot of different outlets and parks. It's good to hit them where their wallet is, but I argue 2 things
- If you want to starve them we need to go farther. Streaming is only a fraction of their 23 Billion quarterly revenue
- They are not the only player in this mess.
You also have the local broadcast affilitates who need FCC approval for local broadcasts and for mergers. Sinclair and Nexstar. Nexstar has a merger coming up with Tegna that would give them 32 out of 200 ABC affiliates.
I'm going to pick on Sinclair though as I don't think they're an honest player in this game and haven't been for a while.
One of the headlines circulating around is "Local TV giant Sinclair demands Jimmy Kimmel make ‘direct apology’ to Charlie Kirk’s family, donate to TPUSA"
https://nypost.com/2025/09/18/media/sinclair-demands-jimmy-kimmel-apologize-to-charlie-kirks-family/
For those that don't know, a lot of the local broadcast channels are owned by large corporations. Sinclair has been working on gobbling up a lot of local affiliate channels across the US. They do about 3.5 Billion dollars in revenue a year (according to their 2024 annual SEC filing).
While they're not an outright right wing propaganda network a lot of their networks tend to have a bit of "right washing" over stories where they conveniently leave out important tidbits or have things skew to what Sinclair wants.
John Oliver does a great expose on them and a lot of the dangers they present: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc
It's not a surprise that they'd look for any excuse to cut Kimmel from their line ups.
Their revenue break down is as follows
Distribution revenue. Distribution revenue, which represents fees earned from Distributors for our broadcast signals, increased $52 million or 4% in 2024, when compared to the same period in 2023. Contractual rate increases favorably impacted period-over-period distribution revenue by high-teen percentages for the year ended December 31, 2024. The increase in distribution revenue as a result of increased contractual rates was offset by a decrease in subscribers by low double-digit percentages for 2024.
Core advertising revenue. Core advertising revenue decreased $40 million in 2024, when compared to the same period in 2023, with no particular product/services category dominating the variance and was primarily a result of the political crowd out effect.
Political advertising revenue. Political advertising revenue increased $361 million in 2024, when compared to the same period in 2023, primarily due to 2024 being a presidential political year, compared to 2023 which was an off-year election cycle, and therefore only had a small number of political races and correspondingly less political advertising spend.
You can see this all here: https://s3.amazonaws.com/sec.irpass.cc/2732/0001971213-25-000012.pdf
https://sbgi.net/investor-relations/sec-filings/sinclair-broadcast-group-sec-filings/
So here comes to the point. I want to stop giving Sinclair money. In fact I want to go farther and starve this beast. And I need ideas on how.
How do we hit them in their bottom line?
That’s not fun at all