Nobody wants to air the Daytime Emmy Awards

Kevin Winter/Getty Images for ATI

Nobody wants to air the Daytime Emmy Awards
(Image credit: Kevin Winter/Getty Images for ATI)

For the first time in its 41-year history, the Daytime Emmy Awards won't be broadcast on live television. The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences announced Thursday that since it couldn't secure an agreement with a network, it will live-stream the June 22 ceremony on its website.

The shift online represents a declining interest in soap operas. In the award show's heyday in the early 1990s, as many as 20 million people tuned in, before dropping to around nine million viewers a decade later. CBS and ABC have both carried the show, before it was bumped to the lower-rated CW network in 2009, where a measly two million viewers tuned in. The past two ceremonies have aired on CNN's HLN network, where ratings dropped even further.

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Jordan Valinsky is the lead writer for Speed Reads. Before joining The Week, he wrote for New York Observer's tech blog, Betabeat, and tracked the intersection between popular culture and the internet for The Daily Dot. He graduated with a degree in online journalism from Ohio University.