Daily show host 2024

When Jon Stewart left "The Daily Show" in 2015, he had a modest but meaningful audience on cable TV. When he comes back next month, he'll find that in his absence, the show's audience has gotten much, much smaller.

And much, much older.

You can see the story laid out in two charts using data from Nielsen.

"The Daily Show's" overall audience has shrunk by 75% — from 2.2 million viewers a night to 570,000.

And the age of the audience has skyrocketed because younger viewers are barely watching at all.

When Stewart left, the median age of his audience was 48.2 years old.

Now it's 63.3.

It's not news that TV audiences have been shrinking for years and that younger people are increasingly tuned out of TV. And that the trend affects all kinds of viewing, but particularly in late-night.

You'd see similar struggles if you plotted the audience for Jimmy Fallon or Jimmy Kimmel.

Still, this is one of those things where you can know this stuff intellectually — and still be shocked when you see it la

how many viewers does the daily show have

daily show viewership over the years