Business
Trump’s threats against late-night TV could spell more trouble for advertisers
A sign is displayed outside the El Capitan Entertainment Centre in Hollywood where the “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” show will be recorded on the first night the show will return to the ABC lineup on September 23, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.
Mario Tama | Getty Images
Late-night television has come under fire in recent months. That could leave advertisers and media companies, already clinging to what’s left on live TV, with an even smaller pool of options.
The recent upheaval in late-night programming — namely the cancellation of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and the temporary suspension of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” — has shown a spotlight on ratings and revenue for late-night standouts and spurred questions of political influence.
President Donald Trump, aggressively vocal about both Colbert’s and Kimmel’s bad fortune, has called for late-night shows on NBC hosted by Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers to be next on the chopping block.
The result is not just uncertainty for viewers, TV executives and show staffs, but a pall over an advertising category that’s long been a staple of live TV.
“Reaching a lot of people who are engaged because it’s live TV — or live-to-tape — is really important, and when you think about it from the media company’s perspective … the live moments are live sports on most given nights, the nightly news and late-night talk shows. That’s all you have,” said Kevin Krim, CEO of ad data firm EDO.
“To the people who think late night doesn’t matter, they’re not thinking about the economics and the goals and the incentives of both the advertisers and the media companies. They’re ignoring some of the strategic value of the ecosystem,” he added.
When Disney’s ABC pulled “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” off the air in September, it was unclear for days if or when the program would return. While Disney reinstated Kimmel less than a week later, more than 20% of the country still couldn’t watch the show for three additional days as two major broadcast station owners preempted the content.
Colbert’s show will end next year after CBS parent Paramount announced in July it wouldn’t renew the program, citing financial considerations. The company has yet to reveal plans to fill the timeslot or give it back to the affiliate network owner.
The fervor around Colbert’s upcoming cancellation caused a temporary ratings surge, and Kimmel’s suspension led the show to rake in millions of viewers upon its return — way above the average and a missed opportunity for advertisers in the markets where Kimmel was preempted.
Late-night draw
Traditional TV viewership has decreased as the audience opts for streaming. But live content still garners the biggest ratings, which includes late-night talk shows.
As a result, late-night shows remain a valuable time slot for advertisers, especially for a younger demographic.
“Late-night may not draw the same mass audiences it once did, but the viewers who tune in are highly intentional. For advertisers, that makes the space less about sheer scale and more about reaching a consistent, engaged community,” said Julie Clark, longtime ad industry executive and current senior vice president of media and entertainment at TransUnion.
“Jimmy Kimmel Live!” was considered among the top 10 of ABC’s best vehicles for advertising reach, with the show delivering 2.5% of the network’s total ad exposures, or 11.8 billion national TV impressions, according to ad measurement firm iSpot.
According to EDO, in order to generate as much ad impact as one ad in the late-night comedy broadcast programs — that’s Kimmel, Fallon, Meyers and Colbert — advertisers would need to air, on average, about four spots across competitive late-night programming this year. In this case, competitive late-night programming means everything aired on broadcast and cable TV, excluding the late-night hosts, during these time slots.
Brands launching new products still get their best success from live TV commercials, according to ad industry executives.
But advertisers have begun to cut back on ad spending in the face of macroeconomic headwinds and trade uncertainty. Recently, eMarketer and the Interactive Advertising Bureau each released reports projecting a pullback in ad spending, not just for TV but also digital and streaming, due to higher costs for companies brought on by tariffs.
As advertisers trim spend and Trump puts late night in his crosshairs, the costs of these TV programs are coming under the microscope.
Weighing the costs
Media companies’ priorities have shifted to building out their streaming platforms in a push for profits. Pay TV networks still make the majority of the profits, but that number is shrinking.
“Generally speaking, viewership of late night talk shows has been low compared to what they once were, but it’s less about a specific host or show and more about the shift in how people consume television,” said Vicky Chang, vice president of media at Tatari, a TV ad platform.
Paramount said in July its move to end Colbert was “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night.” Kimmel’s show will face another test when his contract comes up in 2026.
“Late-night TV and daytime morning shows used to be two of the most profitable areas of TV, more so than sports because of the big sports rights fees. Networks typically made a huge amount of money,” said Jonathan Miller, longtime senior media industry executive who serves as CEO of Integrated Media. “Initially late-night shows weren’t very expensive, but the costs have gone up. But ratings have declined so it’s less profitable – and hosts still want a lot of money.”
The focus for media companies is increasingly on content that guarantees big live audiences — by and large, live sports. This has led to hefty spending on sports rights over other kinds of content.
Weeks after Colbert said this season would be his final, the newly merged Paramount Skydance announced a $7.7 billion media rights deal with UFC. ABC parent Disney and NBCUniversal last year signed a new media rights deal with the NBA worth $77 billion over 11 years.
Media companies are also facing the daunting cost of rising political pressure.
Trump and Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr have ramped up scrutiny of media companies during the president’s second term in office.
Last year ABC News agreed to pay $15 million toward Trump’s presidential library to settle a lawsuit over comments by TV anchor George Stephanopoulos that Trump called defamatory. And this summer Paramount agreed to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit over the editing of a CBS “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
Weeks after that settlement, Paramount and Skydance won federal approval for their long-awaited merger.
Colbert later referred to Paramount’s settlement as a “big fat bribe” during one of his show’s opening monologues. Soon after, the company announced the future end date of the late-night show.
Disney’s suspension of Kimmel came on the heels of comments by the FCC’s Carr that suggested affiliate ABC stations could lose their broadcast licenses if they aired content that was against the “public interest.” Trump made a similar threat regarding the broadcast networks that he said are “against” him.
Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal, which owns CNBC. Versant would become the new parent company of CNBC upon Comcast’s planned spinoff of Versant.
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The U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) building stands after it was reported the IRS will lay off about 6,700 employees, a restructuring that could strain the tax-collecting agency’s resources during the critical tax-filing season, in Washington, D.C., Feb. 20, 2025.
Kent Nishimura | Reuters
A version of this article first appeared in CNBC’s Inside Wealth newsletter with Robert Frank, a weekly guide to the high-net-worth investor and consumer. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.
For seven years, wealthy Americans faced a looming deadline to take advantage of tax provisions that were set to expire at the end of 2025. While the One Big Beautiful Bill Act alleviated much of the uncertainty by making most of the cuts permanent, lawyers and tax accountants say the ever-shifting tax code requires constant planning.
With this year’s Tax Day now behind us, here are five of the most important planning strategies wealthy investors and high earners are thinking about for next year and beyond.
1. Long-short tax-loss harvesting
Last year’s tax bill permanently raised the estate tax exemption to $15 million per person, up from $13.99 million. (It was initially set to be cut in half at the end of 2025.)
The higher threshold has prompted a shift in focus from minimizing federal estate taxes to lowering taxes on income and capital gains. Minimizing capital gains has become crucial after several years of strong market gains, according to Mitchell Drossman, head of national wealth strategies in Bank of America’s chief investment office. The S&P 500 has surged more than 75% since the beginning of 2023.
“The biggest tax story to me is a capital gains and investing story,” said Drossman. “You have lots of clients who are sitting on significant gains.”
Investors are increasingly turning to long-short tax-loss harvesting, an aggressive form of a popular strategy, in order to minimize capital gains, Drossman said. With traditional tax-loss harvesting, investors sell losing assets to offset realized gains on others. Long-short tax strategies, on the other hand, borrow against the portfolio to buy short positions expected to fall and maintain long positions expected to thrive.
“If there’s natural volatility in the markets, you have, now, a greater amount of an asset base to choose from in terms of harvesting losses,” he said. “But when you look at your overall portfolio, you’re still kind of neutral.”
2. Bonus depreciation
The 2025 tax bill renewed bonus depreciation, allowing businesses to deduct the full cost of qualifying assets like machinery, computers or vehicles the first year they are used.
Adam Ludman, head of tax strategy at J.P. Morgan Private Bank, said many clients with operating businesses are investing with bonus depreciation in mind, such as buying private jets.
Real estate developers and investors are trying to get the most bang for their buck by assessing which parts of their properties can be depreciated faster, according to Ludman. For instance, while a commercial building can take 39 years to depreciate, a parking lot can be depreciated over 15 years, allowing owners to recover costs faster.
3. Changing domiciles
A wave of blue states are considering new taxes on top earners and high-net-worth individuals in order to cover cuts in federal aid. California’s one-time billionaire tax proposal may end up on the November ballot, while Maine and Washington have recently passed millionaire taxes.
Jane Ditelberg, chief tax strategist for Northern Trust Wealth Management, said a growing number of clients are asking how to change their tax status as these proposals gain traction. Depending on their state, residents can avoid state-level taxes by creating trusts in states with favorable trust income laws like Delaware.
The most straightforward way to avoid local taxes is to change your domicile, which is easier said than done, according to Jere Doyle of BNY Wealth. The senior estate planning strategist based in Massachusetts, which imposes a millionaire tax, said he has had clients move to New Hampshire and establish residency before selling their businesses.
But clients are often loath to take the steps necessary to establish intent not to return, Doyle said. For instance, moving to Florida may not be enough to avoid Massachusetts taxes if you refuse to sell your Martha’s Vineyard home, he said.
“Everyone thinks that if they spend 183 days in another state, you’re domiciled in that state. That’s not necessarily true. Each state’s a little bit different,” he said. “You [have] got to change where you vote, where your car is registered, even where your doctors are, what clubs you belong to, golf clubs, country clubs, things like that.”
4. Bunching charitable gifts
One notable drawback of last year’s tax bill was a reduction in the tax benefits of charitable giving for top earners.
The bill limits top-earning donors in two ways. First, starting this year, donors who itemize will only be able to deduct charitable contributions in excess of 0.5% of their adjusted gross income, or AGI.
Second, taxpayers in the 37% tax bracket will have their itemized deductions reduced by 2/37th of the value. This ceiling reduces the effective tax benefit from 37% to 35%.
Ditelberg said many clients accelerated their charitable giving last year before these new rules took effect. She said she anticipates clients will continue to “bunch” their donations, by giving a larger sum in one year rather than spreading it over multiple years, so they only trigger the 0.5% haircut once, either through their foundations or donor-advised funds.
5. Opportunity zones
The tax bill also offered an incentive for business owners and real estate owners to postpone selling their assets. The bill made permanent the qualified opportunity zone program, which allows investors to defer capital gains by rolling them over into a fund that invests in a low-income community.
The opportunity zone funds created under the first Trump administration still exist, but you can only defer the taxes until the end of the year. The new opportunity zones, which have yet to be designated, come with enhanced benefits, especially for investors in rural communities. For instance, if you hold your investment in a qualified rural opportunity fund for five years, your capital gains are reduced by 30% for tax purposes.
But you only have 180 days to roll over your gains, and the new opportunity zone rules don’t take effect until 2027, Ditelberg noted.
“If you’re thinking of incurring a major gain, you may want to defer it until August or September, instead of doing it in May or June, if you think you would like to take advantage of the opportunity zone deferral,” she said. “I think we’re going to see people who are incurring gains in the second half of this year.”
That said, investors are waiting to see what the new funds entail. Drossman said some clients are reluctant to invest in opportunity zones again after their previous investments underperformed.
“It’s a classic example of not letting the tax-tail wag the dog because these need to be sound investments,” he said. “Like with all investments, there is an element of risk and return.”
Illuminated logo for Pepsi on a soda fountain in Walnut Creek, California, March 4, 2026.
Smith Collection | Gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images
PepsiCo on Thursday reported quarterly earnings and revenue that topped analysts’ expectations as its struggling North American food business reported a return to volume growth.
Here’s what the company reported compared with what Wall Street was expecting, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG:
- Earnings per share: $1.61 adjusted vs. $1.55 expected
- Revenue: $19.44 billion vs. $18.94 billion expected
Pepsi reported first-quarter net income attributable to the company of $2.32 billion, or $1.70 per share, up from $1.83 billion, or $1.33 per share, a year earlier.
Excluding items, the company earned $1.61 per share.
Net sales rose 8.5% to $19.44 billion.
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