>"How on earth did user/market research not show them this would be the result?"

Oh but it did! That's the problem when you pay people a lot of money to find the evidence you tell them you want

Unfortunately, reality does not care about said "studies".

I think this is actually a result of the WarnerMedia / Discover merger. In a different article they say that the new CEO wants to consolidate under a single streaming service. So they are likely just going to move the content into Discovery+ or HBOMax.

They spent 300 million on this and got 18k subscribers. There are single youtubers who have more paying patrons on Patreon than that. Merger or not, CNN+ was never going to crawl, nevermind fly.

It's another example of how disconnected the elites are from reality.

It is an oddly emotionally satisfying rationale and I reflexively agree.

But upon closer examination part of me wonders if this particular project was a victim of creation by committee, where there was only one person, who could make decisions and the rest were well-paid bobbleheads.

I have no doubt marketing did their research ( and as much as I hate ads, marketing people look for how things really are ), it is possible only some pieces filtered up and/or dissenting voices were just drowned out by 'why are you holding us up?' type of responses.

I am obviously speculating here, but elites ( however you define them ) are people too and subject to most of the same issues as most of us.

I like your level-headed take.

Having been in the trenches on a large scale initiative gone awry, my hunch would be the same as yours: the lack of strong/well informed leadership leads to bad decision-making despite all the checkboxes being checked (market research, etc).

In that case, it's easy to blame the "elites" (who certainly do deserve blame). Doing so blindly without deeper reflection is cathartic but not too productive or meaningful. A lot of times, the "elites" are victims of a system bigger than them (established culture, procedures, politics, etc). Spending energy to change said system would IMO be more productive than playing the blame game.

I think you're spot on. CNN, as a company, is not run like a news organization any more. There is a specific objective and the content they produce is designed to influence rather than to inform. The broader market is onto this dynamic. They are selling a very specific product to a specific audience. It turns out that the audience doesn't think it is worth much.

This is another sign that CNN is on life support.

While I personally agree with you, it's also important to note that CNN+ had none of the news content of CNN, apparently...

It's possible it didn't cost that much to develop, or that what they did develop can be used for non-plus products. Might have been deemed worth a small risk.

Most all of these streaming setups are white label of a handful of existing products.