"we're losing the young viewers to other platforms"....
well yeah, who do you think makes the money off their content on other platforms?
Here's a good example....the video where Colbert announces the end of the show currently has 4.3 million views and all of their videos released yesterday have a combined total of 7.1 million views (in 1 day) but the day prior did about 3.5 million views. So 45 weeks of that is 787 million annual views. At a CPM of $2.50 that's an additional 2 million just in basic ass adsense revenue on one platform, without even trying, just posting 6-8 pieces of content from the TV show and walking away. Also, keep in mind that a lot of the content they generate will create revenue more or less in perpetuity, so looking at the views it's done in the first day or two isn't indicative of the revenue it will generate over time. This shit gets shared around the internet for months.
Just to give a better idea of the money available, there's a tech youtube channel, Linus Tech Tips that is larger (16m subs) and opened up about their 2024 ad revenue recently. They did 57 fucking million in youtube adverting last year (adsense + direct sponsorships). Don't let these TV execs fool you with this shit crying about lost ad revenue, it's just shifted to another column on their spreadsheets. They're still premier content providers.