The conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns or operates 185 TV stations in 85 U.S. markets, suffered a 16 percent revenue slide in the third quarter of 2025, the same period in which it pulled ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! from its channels.
Sinclair’s revenue for the third quarter stood at $773 million as the company recorded a $1 million loss, a surprise given that it made a $94 million profit in the equivalent period for 2024, Variety reports.
Advertising revenue from its services declined 26 percent year-over-year during the same quarter to $321 million, with political commercials in particular generating just $6 million, compared to $138 million in the third quarter of 2024, as buyers shied away.
Speaking on an earnings call, CEO Chris Ripley did not address the Kimmel boycott’s impact on the results and insisted instead: “Sinclair delivered a strong third quarter, achieving the high end of guidance for advertising and distribution revenue, while media expenses and adjusted EBITDA beat expectations.
“We expect to see continued improvement in core advertising trends in the fourth quarter and a sequential increase in distribution revenue.”
The Independent has reached out to Sinclair for further comment.
The Kimmel affair began on Monday, September 15, when the comedian caused an uproar among Republicans by using his opening monologue to accuse them of attempting to “score political points” off the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, who was shot dead by a sniper on a Utah college campus on September 10. He also joked that President Donald Trump had grieved the activist’s murder “the way a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”
Kimmel was duly suspended by ABC “indefinitely,” a move opposed by free speech advocates but cheered by Trump and other conservatives as network affiliate owners Sinclair and Nexstar both dropped the show from their stations nationwide. The former said at the time that its decision was made “independent of any government interaction or influence.”
However, the comedian returned to the air eight days later to deliver an emotional expression of contrition. “If you like me, you like me,” Kimmel said. “If you don’t, you don’t. I have no illusions about changing anyone’s mind. But I do want to make something clear, because it’s important to me as a human and that is you understand that it was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man.”
Kimmel also paid tribute to Erika Kirk for saying at her husband’s Arizona memorial that she “forgave” his killer. She has since revealed that Sinclair representatives reached out to her, offering a personal apology from the comic that she declined.
Jimmy Kimmel Live! subsequently returned to Sinclair channels on September 26 over the objections of some on the right, including Kirk’s former podcast executive producer Andrew Kolvet, who rebuked ABC and advised Sinclair and Nexstar that they did not “have to make the same choice.”
On the earnings call, Ripley complained that his company’s real problem was that it had become caught up in a tussle between “media giants,” alluding to a scrap between Disney and Google that has seen Disney ABC and ESPN shows blocked from a livestreaming TV package offered by YouTube, which is owned by the Silicon Valley search engine behemoth.
Ripley called the matter an “anti-trust issue” and said: “As local broadcasters, we have no say in whether our content – and the content we pay to air – will be distributed to local viewers. We believe this practice needs to be stopped.”
He also said he was optimistic that the Federal Communications Commission would either raise or abolish its current 39 percent ownership cap on nationwide broadcasters in the first half of 2026, which would be to Sinclair’s advantage in the future and promise a brighter future.
