>>149781778You can't always have megahits like Adventure Time and Teen Titans Go though. Remember the excuse they gave about DC Nation's shows like Young Justice and Green Lantern being canceled? The show couldnt support themselves on ratings alone, despite having good ratings, and were canceled because they didn't have enough toy sales (or any toy sales, for GL).
Plus, all the shows you listed had merch still. They still sold tons of minifigures, tshirts, and plushies for these series, even if they weren't traditional toys.
There's a reason why there were a thousand different cartoon series in the 80s/90s every single season on ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and WB, and that's because every new cartoon had a toyline ready to make hundreds of millions of dolllars every year as its MAIN SUPPORT. Getting ratings/ad revenue was nothing to them, despite that being the DIRECT way of a cartoon making money.
Shock and awe, now that it's harder for cartoons to get a toyline, there's far fewer cartoons. Today media companies produce cartoons first and then get a toyline later, whereas before the toys came out around the same time as it was broadcast. This is because ratings are so obfuscated now, they don't tell you how many viewers something gets anymore, but "minutes watched." So even if something is broadcast still, you're still only getting a fraction of data about how many people watched it, because the netflix/disney+/hulu views are kept hidden.
So there's not a lot of trust between these media and merch companies anymore, especially because ratings used to be independently verified by a third party company (nielsen, etc). I mean, even merch sales are still independently tracked and verified. It's no longer a two way street, and media companies have always been known to fudge their numbers even before they could hide all the data behind streaming services.
