Disney Says Late Night Is Shrinking. Jimmy Kimmel’s Ratings Tell a More Complicated Story

A quick note to fellow media reporters: LateNighter pays to license Nielsen ratings data in order to independently cover late-night TV viewership trends. If these figures inform your own reporting, please credit and link back to this post. We appreciate the collegial courtesy, and it helps sustain this reporting.

At almost any other point in television history, Jimmy Kimmel would be entering his latest contract negotiations with Disney from a position of unusual strength.

But as those negotiations play out, Disney has been publicly emphasizing another reality: the shrinking audience for late-night television as a whole.

“The truth is, it’s a very challenging day part, late night,” Disney president Dana Walden said last week while discussing Kimmel’s future at ABC with Lucas Shaw at Bloomberg’s Screentime conference in Los Angeles.

“That’s not to say that Jimmy is not doing a phenomenal job, and his ratings are up,” she continued, “but they’re up relative to a smaller audience that’s watching late night on broadcast television.”

There is no disputing the broader point. The audience for broadcast television has declined dramatically over the last two decades—especially among advertiser-coveted younger viewers—and late night has gone with it.

What that framing leaves out is just how well Jimmy Kimmel Live! has been performing within that shrinking television universe.

The 2025-26 season was Jimmy Kimmel Live!’s most-watched in a decade, averaging 2.53 million viewers in Nielsen Live+7 ratings, up 43% from the previous season.

Among adults 18-49, Kimmel averaged 296,000 viewers, up 44% year over year and his strongest performance in the advertiser-coveted demographic in five years.

Of course, the long-term trend is still unmistakable, especially among viewers in the demo.

When Kimmel moved from 12:05 a.m. to 11:35 p.m. in January 2013, the show was averaging more than 900,000 adults 18-49. By 2024-25, that number had fallen to just over 200,000.

But Kimmel’s audience has not fallen nearly as fast as the number of people watching television while his show is on.

Compared to his first season at 11:35, Kimmel's total-viewer audience is essentially unchanged. The overall number of people watching television during that time period, meanwhile, has fallen by roughly 60%.

Among adults 18-49, Kimmel’s audience is down about two-thirds. The available TV audience in the demo has fallen by more than 80%.

Put another way: fewer people really are watching television at that hour, but Kimmel is capturing a much larger share of the ones who remain.

That is perhaps the most striking number in the data.

In 2025-26, Jimmy Kimmel Live! posted a 9.72 total-viewer share, meaning nearly one in ten people watching television during the show’s telecasts were tuned to Kimmel. That easily surpassed the show’s previous record of 6.67, set just one season earlier.

Its adults 18-49 share reached 5.70, also a series record. The previous high was 3.93, dating all the way back to Kimmel’s first season in 2003.

There are some obvious reasons why 2025-26 would have been an unusually favorable year for Kimmel.

For one, Kimmel’s highly anticipated return following his suspension produced extraordinary attention for the show and set a new late-night ratings record, going all the way back to Johnny Carson's final Tonight Show episodes.

But the improvement wasn’t confined to one or two unusual nights.

June—after Colbert’s departure—was the highest-rated month in Jimmy Kimmel Live! history. The NBA Finals undoubtedly helped, but Kimmel has had Finals lead-ins in previous years without producing numbers on that scale.

The show has also continued to perform at unusually high levels after Kimmel returned from his traditional summer break in September, suggesting that his gains during 2025-26 were broader than any single event and that they're poised to carry into the new season.

And then there is the contract history.

Disney's last two renewals of Jimmy Kimmel Live! came when the show's ratings were lower than they are today.

In 2021-22, the final full season before Kimmel signed a three-year extension in September 2022, Jimmy Kimmel Live! averaged 1.59 million viewers and 269,000 adults 18-49.

Before his next extension, negotiated in 2025, the show averaged 1.77 million viewers and 206,000 adults 18-49.

In 2025-26, it averaged 2.53 million viewers and 296,000 in the demo.

That puts Kimmel 59% above his 2021-22 total-viewer average and 10% higher in adults 18-49. Compared with 2024-25, he is up 43% in viewers and 44% in the demo.

None of this, by itself, answers the larger economic questions facing Disney.

Ratings do not reveal what Jimmy Kimmel Live! costs to produce, how much ABC earns from the show, how its advertising economics may have changed, or what value Disney places on the time slot. A television show can improve its ratings and still become less attractive financially.

Walden said as much about Kimmel's streaming numbers, which often eclipse his linear ratings. "That is not a lucrative opportunity for a very premium talk show," she said last week.

And Disney is making its calculation against pressures far larger than late night. Like every legacy media company, it is managing the long decline of linear television while spending heavily to reposition its business around streaming and other digital platforms. In that environment, even a show whose ratings are improving can face a higher bar if the business around it is shrinking.

Kimmel also presents considerations that go beyond his show’s balance sheet. A frequent antagonist of Donald Trump, he has at times put Disney in difficult positions that have little to do with ratings. Some inside or outside the company may see that as an added complication; others may see his willingness to take on powerful figures as part of his value.

In other words, Kimmel can be a ratings asset while presenting challenges for Disney that Nielsen numbers alone can’t capture.

But if linear audience erosion is part of the argument for why late night has become such a difficult business, Kimmel presents an unusual case.

The overall television audience around him has gotten much smaller. His share of it has gotten much bigger.

And as Disney decides what Jimmy Kimmel Live! is worth going forward, it is doing so with more people watching the show than were watching either of the last two times it chose to keep him.

Get stories like this in your inbox: Sign up for LateNighter’s free daily newsletter.