Byron Allen takes over Stephen Colbert's CBS slot and buys BuzzFeed in a massive media power play

Black media mogul Byron Allen has taken over Stephen Colbert's coveted CBS late-night slot and acquired a controlling stake in BuzzFeed in the same week, cementing his position as one of the most aggressive forces in American broadcast media and capping a decades-long push to build a dominant Black-owned media empire in the United States.

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert aired its final episode on May 21, ending an 11-year run at the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York. CBS announced Colbert's cancellation in July 2025, citing a late-night advertising market that has shrunk dramatically, with ad spending on late-night television falling to $209 million in 2025 from $519.7 million in 2017, a collapse of nearly 60 percent in less than a decade.

Allen had his hand up before the ink was dry. "If they're looking for a show, my hand is already up," he told reporters at New York's Advertising Week in October 2025. "Fifty years, I've been waiting for this moment. Definitely, I'm going for it."

He got it. Allen purchased two hours of nightly airtime from CBS in a time-buy deal running through the 2026-27 television season. His show Comics Unleashed moved from its 12:35 a.m. slot up to 11:35 p.m., taking Colbert's old prime position, with back-to-back half-hour episodes each night. His comedy game show Funny You Should Ask holds the 12:37 a.m. hour. Allen Media Group handles all advertising sales for both programmes, keeping CBS insulated from any ratings pressure while CBS collects a guaranteed flat fee.

The financial structure matters as much as the airtime itself. CBS confirmed the arrangement will generate $55 million in revenue for the network, with $15 million flowing through as profit. For a broadcast company that has been scrambling to monetise its late-night real estate in a declining ad market, the guaranteed income from a time-buy arrangement is far more attractive than the uncertainty of producing and selling advertising around an in-house show. CBS gets the money regardless of how Allen's programmes perform.

The ratings reality has been stark. Comics Unleashed drew approximately one million viewers in its opening run at the 11:35 p.m. slot, compared to Colbert's average of 2.7 million during his final stretch in 2026. But Allen's model does not depend on Colbert's audience. It depends on his own ability to sell advertising to brands that want access to a CBS audience, and he has spent three decades building exactly that kind of commercial infrastructure.

The CBS deal was not the only headline Allen generated in the same week. He also acquired a controlling stake in BuzzFeed and will serve as its new chief executive, taking over from co-founder Jonah Peretti, who is stepping aside to focus on artificial intelligence product development. The deal, expected to close by the end of May 2026, will see Allen expand BuzzFeed into free-streaming video, audio and user-generated content. Peretti called Allen "one of the most accomplished media entrepreneurs in the industry" and expressed confidence that Allen's relationships with talent would bring major stars to the BuzzFeed platform.

BuzzFeed peaked at a $1.7 billion valuation in 2016 after NBCUniversal made a $200 million investment and went public in 2021. The acquisition price for Allen's controlling stake has not been disclosed publicly, but the company's trajectory from that peak makes clear he acquired it at a steep discount to its former valuation.

The two deals together paint a picture of Allen executing a strategy he has been building toward for decades. Allen Media Group is one of the largest Black-owned media companies in the United States, with a portfolio that includes 35 or more television stations across major markets, The Weather Channel, Local Now, HBCUGo, Comedy.TV, and a growing slate of film and television content. He has pursued, and mostly been rebuffed on, a string of larger acquisitions, offering $30 billion for Paramount Global in 2024, $3.5 billion for BET in 2023, and multibillion-dollar bids for Tegna and other broadcast assets.

The Paramount bid went to David Ellison's Skydance Media. The BET bid went nowhere. The CBS slot and BuzzFeed are smaller in dollar terms but may prove more consequential in practice, because Allen has actually closed them.

Allen has been explicit about his programming philosophy. "We don't talk about politics. We don't talk about anything that's topical," he told CNN in May, positioning Comics Unleashed as a deliberately controversy-free entertainment product at a moment when American late-night television has become deeply identified with political commentary. Whether that positioning wins back the viewers Colbert commanded or attracts an entirely different audience will be the defining test of the next 12 months.

What is not in question is the scale of the infrastructure Allen has assembled. He produces, distributes and sells advertising for 74 television programmes, making him one of the largest independent producers and distributors of first-run syndicated television in the United States. The CBS slot is one move in a game he has been playing for five decades.