ESPN is arguably the "most valuable media brand in the world," and the net is "impressively open to learning how the digital generation clicks on and watches ESPN -- even if it means changing their own internal definition about what counts as sports news," according to Derek Thompson on THE ATLANTIC. The move to more media consumption on mobile devices is of "particular importance to ESPN, which has a lot to win in the new distributed media environment, but also, perhaps, the most to lose." ESPN gets the "vast majority of its revenue from TV, particularly from its 'affiliate fees'" that are estimated at about $7B annually. However, the "most valuable piece of glass for ESPN could be the smartphone screen." The company delivers around 600 million "alerts to tens of millions of phones" across all of its apps in an average week. Those alerts, along with ESPN's "more traditional digital offerings, such as its app and its new daily feature on Snapchat, have created a mobile Internet audience that is far larger than its television audience -- but also, without anything like an affiliate-fee model to support it, harder to monetize." To help draw in the mobile audience, ESPN has created a "team of digital producers and editors, called the 'Push' team, to speak the lingua franca of the Internet -- short, colloquial, off-beat and irreverent -- across social media platforms." ESPN Now Senior Dir Nate Ravitz said, "It's stuff that is outside of the day-to-day construct of sports. ... It's the moments we have conversations about, and we want to tell it the way you would tell your friend at the bar." Ravitz said the Push team was created in '14 because as social media had "risen to be this very powerful form of content distribution and traffic," ESPN was not "tapping into that the way that many other companies were, both in the sports world and not."
PUSH IT REAL GOOD: Thompson noted the Push team "reimagines some of the company's best content for the sports fan who dwells among short-form content and feeds -- on Facebook, on Instagram, or even on ESPN.com." A main part of the Push strategy is a "constantly updating column of digital news, called ESPN Now, which runs along the right-hand side of the homepage and has its own section in the ESPN app." The Now column is a "stream of short-form content, including breaking news, notable quotes and tweets from athletes and reporters, memorable moments, and infographics from ESPN's TV shows." During major events, ESPN Now is a "relentless, even indispensable, waterfall of updates and reactions that allows the homepage to update at the speed of news." Another main strategy includes notifications. More than 500,000 people "subscribe to 18 of ESPN's alerts," and each news alert "vibrates in more than ... 5 million pockets and purses." There also is the "social arm of ESPN's operation, which oversees its prodigious output on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram." ESPN has 20 million followers on Twitter and 10 Facebook pages fans with at least 2 million fans each, but Ravitz is "mindful that he needs to adopt a particular tone for each social-media audience, which won't always match those of the network's other properties." Meanwhile, ESPN has created a "daily video production" on Snapchat. When users tap the ESPN logo on a Snapchat page, they "see a sequence of looping videos that, if you tap or swipe down, reveal a full article or video clip." The company's use of Snapchat "combines the best of the web -- where users can control the flow of information with the flick of a finger -- and the best of TV -- a procession of video that can hold my attention for fidgetless minutes" (THEATLANTIC.com, 7/9).
