Election Traffic To FiveThirtyEight Helps ESPN To Second-Best Monthly ComScore Total

ESPN in November posted its second-best comScore digital reach figure and the category’s third-best total ever with a mark of 101.8 million unique visitors as it continued to see strong traffic for football coverage, fantasy content and for analytics site FiveThirtyEight.com. The figure is just shy of ESPN’s company record of 104.57 million uniques posted in September. It also led the category in consumption totals with an average of 91.2 minutes per user during November, and 9.3 billion total minutes, though those numbers were each down from record-setting totals the prior month. ESPN’s lead of 34.5 million uniques over No. 2 CBS also broke its own comScore record of the largest-ever margin between the No.1 and No. 2 entities in monthly records. Meanwhile, CBS has reached the No. 2 slot behind ESPN each of the last three months, the first time it has ever done that, as it has generated growing audiences for its core CBSSports.com as well holdings such as 247Sports.com and Max Preps. Its total last month of 67.3 million uniques is up 13% from a year ago, far outpacing the growth rates of most of its competitors. “We have seen a great deal of traction around core principles of making ourselves more personalized, more social and more mobile to the user,” said CBS Sports Digital Senior VP & GM Jeff Gerttula.