The Nickelodeon Numbers Paramount Can’t Afford to Ignore

Another tough day, week, month, year in the entertainment industry. Thousands of folks losing their jobs at Paramount. I had my own layoff era seven years ago, a second round of redundancies to hit Disney at the time. COVID wasn’t even a blip on the horizon. That means the business has been blowing up for the guts of a decade. Years upon years tolerating uncertainty, instability, and whiplash change across our industry.

I ran a poll earlier this week asking if people would prefer this newsletter to cover layoff tips, or to give a kids media landscape take on the current situation at Paramount. It was a resounding “stick to the media analysis, Emily,” which was good with me, because I had helpfully managed to find some hope in the water.

Because here’s what Paramount’s decision-makers need to see: buried in the chaos is a kids media lifeline. Nickelodeon, builder of preschool franchises like Peppa Pig and PAW Patrol, home of SpongeBob SquarePants, professional birthplace of Ariana Grande, is quietly crushing it. And I have the receipts.

Nickelodeon content has bobbed along on the choppy waters since streaming wars began. There was no hardcore exclusivity edict like Disney enforced for their own channels on Disney+. From time to time, I have levelled the criticism that the distribution footprint of Nick shows seemed random, tactical, cash grabbing, rather than strategically focused for the long-term good of its gold standard franchises. But given the chaos of the past five years, that’s hardly surprising. Volatile shifts in corporate gods and mandates will have meant that teams pushed for impact where they could and chased short-term wins where they couldn’t.

The saddest outcome would be for Nickelodeon to go the way of Cartoon Network: a trove of brilliant kids content left wilting on the vine by the US corporation while the grown-ups chase share prices and M&A snafus. In the face of similar challenging corporate turbulence, this is exactly when those Nickelodeon assets need to show their worth.

First up, something we’ve been tracking this for a while here at Kids StreamerSphere Towers, though I’ve only mentioned it in passing. It has been one of those signals that starts as a flicker, then shows up again, then again, until eventually you can’t ignore it anymore. Over the past months the numbers have settled into a clear, steady pattern. SpongeBob SquarePants has officially dethroned Bluey as the biggest kids show on premium streaming in the US (see below).