Disney’s Stupid, Pointless Ban Of Jimmy Kimmel Lost Them 1.7 Million Streaming Subscribers
Well, that happened.
Disney's decision to temporarily ban comedian Jimmy Kimmel for no coherent reason came with some very real costs for the Mickey Mouse club. According to journalist Marisa Kabas, Disney lost an estimated 1.7 million subscribers across Hulu, ESPN, and Disney+ due to public backlash and cancellations.
SCOOP / UPDATE - Disney saw more than 1.7 million total paid streaming cancelations during the period 9/17-9/23, a Disney source confirms to me. The total includes Disney+, Hulu and ESPN.
- Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) 2025-09-29T17:19:55.663Z
Disney and ABC, hand in hand with right wing broadcast affiliates, recently tried to appease our dim authoritarian king by putting his least favorite comedian on hiatus. The claim was that Kimmel had said something insensitive about the the killing of right wing race-baiting propagandist Charlie Kirk; the real reason is the companies are lobbying Trump to eliminate the last remaining media consolidation limits.
Meanwhile Disney, like most major streaming companies, can't help but descend down the rabbit hole of enshittification. With streaming growth saturating and streaming executives fresh out of any sort of innovation or new ideas, major media companies are looking to cut corners, embrace more pointless mergers, raise prices, and otherwise nickel-and-dime existing customers to goose stock valuations.
That's not just included higher prices, but a steady erosion in popular feature set and an unpopular crackdown on things like parents sharing their passwords with their college kids, which the industry supported for years to goose market share.
The result is creating a streaming TV industry that's looking increasingly like the traditional cable giants they once disrupted. Disney had already been struggling with streaming defections due to a series of relentless price hikes. The company lost 700k subscribers earlier this year due to hikes; and recently imposed another wave of hikes that made them particularly sensitive to the Kimmel backlash.
Disney's parent company ABC is particularly keen to eliminate media consolidation limits that prevent the big four networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX) from merging, an ask past administrations wisely refused. The things customers really want (lower prices, better programming, improved feature set, better customer service) erode stock prices, while mergers goose earnings and create tax breaks.
But helping authoritarian assholes trample the First Amendment clearly came with some real-world challenges feckless Disney executives were simply too dim to consider. And if recent history holds, they'll learn absolutely nothing whatsoever from the experience.