Well, it's 2009 all over again.
Noggin is shutting down later this year after almost nine years of operations. All of the staff at Noggin have also been laid off as part of Paramount’s 800 companywide job cuts earlier this week.
Initially serving as Nickelodeon’s Nick Jr.-adjacent cable network alongside Sesame Workshop from 1999-2009, Noggin was a preschool-focused Nickelodeon service relaunching the brand as a direct competitor to the ABCMouse service. The service reached 2.5 million subscribers in 2019, with no subscription data as of 2024.
Noggin included a library of more than 1,000 learning games, activities, shorts, and ebooks as well as over 2,000 episodes of Nick Jr. series like “PAW Patrol,” “Peppa Pig,” “Blaze and the Monster Machines,” “Bubble Guppies,” “Dora the Explorer,” “Backyardigans,” “Wonder Pets,” “Little Bear” and “Blue’s Clues”, all of which are available on Paramount+.
The video content will migrate to Paramount+, which some of Noggin’s originals and shorts have already done. Noggin will soon wind down taking new subscribers. There are no words on where the interactive contents and books will go once the service shuts down.
First, I want to send sympathy and best wishes to all of the laid-off staff workers at Noggin after almost ten years of hard work trying to build a Nick Jr. preschool service that just launched Nogginville, a new interactive digital world launched in December.
I also realized that Paramount probably didn’t find a partner to buy Noggin, which was part of their plan to sell assets like Noggin to make money while they find ways to monetize Paramount+.
Noggin is dead again, and many interactive games and activities are now in jeopardy for lost media. Paramount reveals their Q4 and full-year earnings at the end of this month, so be alerted if Bakish reveals the reason behind the shutdown.