A lot has been written about the impact of cord cutting and there are varying estimates about how significant the phenomenon has become. But there is a different way to examine the effects on the cable industry, which is to count the number of US homes that are paying to subscribe to each cable channel.
Below I am comparing the numbers of subscribers from August 2013 to the same subscriber counts today for some of the more popular channels. It’s easy to see that almost across the board networks have lost a lot of customers. I chose August 2013 because somewhere around that date was the peak of the cable industry in terms of customers. Since then total customers (and also customers for each network) have dropped.
These drops can’t all be attributed to cord cutting – cord shaving (where customers downsize their cable packages) is also a factor in these drops. Some cable systems are also working hard to cut back on the number of channels they carry. To put this chart into perspective, there are currently about 136 million housing units in the US.
| In (000) | |||
| Network | August 2013 | Current | Change |
| Weather Channel | 99,926 | 84,683 | (15,243) |
| ESPN | 97,736 | 87,859 | (9,877) |
| Travel Channel | 94,418 | 84,862 | (9,556) |
| MTV | 97,654 | 88,137 | (9,517) |
| Nickelodeon | 98,799 | 89,663 | (9,136) |
| VH1 | 96,786 | 88,085 | (8,701) |
| TV Land | 96,282 | 87,901 | (8,381) |
| Comedy Central | 97,838 | 89,857 | (7,981) |
| A&E | 98,302 | 90,478 | (7,824) |
| SYFY | 97,447 | 89,854 | (7,593) |
| TNT | 98,139 | 90,586 | (7,553) |
| CNN | 99,292 | 91,794 | (7,498) |
| Discovery Channel | 98,891 | 91,829 | (7,062) |
| HGTV | 98,229 | 91,169 | (7,060) |
| AMC | 97,699 | 90,767 | (6,932) |
| FX | 97,157 | 90,389 | (6,768) |
| E! Entertainment | 96,472 | 89,887 | (6,585) |
| Disney Channel | 98,142 | 91,611 | (6,531) |
| Bravo | 94,129 | 87,620 | (6,509) |
| Food Network | 99,283 | 93,062 | (6,221) |
| MSNBC | 94,519 | 89,764 | (4,755) |
| Oxygen | 78,208 | 75,651 | (2,557) |
| NFL Network | 70,910 | 71,252 | 342 |
| Showtime | 28,094 | 29,014 | 920 |
| HBO | 32,445 | 34,369 | 1,924 |
| Hallmark Channel | 85,897 | 88,885 | 2,988 |
| National Geographic | 84,446 | 89,865 | 5,419 |
These numbers tell a different story than articles about cord cutting. Industry estimates of cord cutting during this same time frame vary between 2.5 and 4 million homes that have dropped cable altogether. But these figures show that most major networks have lost between 6 and 10 million paying subscribers in a little under three and a half years.
Obviously not every network is experiencing the same changes. For example, the 15 million households lost by The Weather Channel are due to many cable systems changing to a cheaper alternative. And you can see at the bottom of the chart that there are still networks that are growing. These networks are gaining customers by attracting more subscriptions, like the premium movie channels, or by getting added to additional cable systems that didn’t carry them in 2013.
But overall this is a sobering chart, and one that all of the programmers are well aware of. The various factors of cord cutting, cord shaving, and of cable companies trying to cut back their channels are all steadily eroding the number of households that get to watch the various networks.