Without the live sports coverage its rivals offer, ESPN "hasn't gained the foothold in the U.K.," according to Lucinda Southern of DIGIDAY. Instead, the sports media firm is "left fighting to emerge from the middle tier." While ESPN ranks No. 1 in sports with nearly 84 million monthly uniques in the U.S., according to comScore, in the U.K. "it ranks seventh in comScore’s sports category, with 3.5 million monthly uniques." Mediacom Head of Sport & Entertainment Misha Sher said, "In the U.S., ESPN's bordering on a cultural phenomenon. It's a different story in the U.K." ESPN is "betting that new personalization features can make up the difference somewhat." Starting Feb. 16, visitors to ESPN.co.uk will be able to "pin their favorite sports to the navigation bar, see their favorite topics featured on the left-hand side of the page and in the future will choose which stories to surface in the content stream that runs down the middle of the site." In April, ESPN.co.uk relaunched its site, "redesigned with mobile and video top of mind." Since the redesign, the company claims it has "seen a 61 percent increase in minutes per visitor spent on site to 7 minutes and 45 seconds." ESPN EMEA VP & GM Charly Classen said, "Our ambition is to give sports fans the best experience from a product and a content perspective, and with that, I am convinced we will grow pretty rapidly." Classen said that ESPN "recently added football club correspondents to offer more Premier League club coverage from leading teams" such as Man City, ManU and Arsenal. He points out the coverage is "also evolving beyond news stories to include multimedia and lifestyle coverage." The move "could carve out a niche for ESPN since it cannot rely on its live sports programming like in the U.S." ESPN no longer holds the rights to air Premier League matches "after losing out to Sky Sports and BT" in '12 (DIGIDAY, 2/16).
