ESPN Finds Success With Katie Nolan Hosting SportsCenter On Snapchat

Victor Cruz, the 31-year-old former New York Giants wide receiver, spoke earlier this month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas about how the consumption of sports content among players is changing, and it didn’t necessarily sound good for ESPN.

“I think it’s all on their phones,” Cruz said. “I think it’s all on the go. Guys are always looking at House of Highlights on Bleacher Report for the latest — whether it’s a highlight of somebody getting dunked on or a funny clip of something that happened on the court or on the field.

“We love those instant, 30-seconds-on-our-phone hot takes about anything under the sun and what’s going on. That’s the way we get our information — not so much sitting down watching a SportsCenter or watching a highlights show or something like that.”

But ESPN has already taken a major step toward addressing those concerns with a new SportsCenter show on Snapchat that debuted in November featuring younger hosts and fast-paced content. So far, the show has been a success.

Shortly before John Skipper resigned as ESPN’s president, he said last month at SVG Summit that 75 percent of ESPN’s viewership of SportsCenter on Snapchat was between the ages of 13 and 24 and millions of viewers — 2 million viewers per day, according to the network that has doubled its overall Snapchat daily viewership.

“We have to remain relevant to that audience,” Skipper said. “We have to go to where they are, present our signature programming in a way appropriate to that platform. We get an audience, and we keep SportsCenter relevant, which of course is very key to us.”

ESPN was an original Snapchat Discover launch partner in 2015, and the newest version of SportsCenter is headlined by recently-hired ESPN talent Katie Nolan.

“It’s just a different medium, so you’re sort of more personal,” she said of being on Snapchat. “You’re connecting more with the viewer. The audience skews younger, and so content we’re going to say things like ‘lit’ and ‘bae.'”

The tone of the videos are geared toward millennials using mobile devices, with content edited so that it caters to the quick-swipe platform. SportsCenter on Snapchat is available twice a day on weekdays and once a day on weekends.

Nolan, who made a name for herself at FOX Sports, told the SI Media Podcast with Richard Deitsch earlier this month that someone who’s turning 31 next week, she was adjusting to using Snapchat herself.

“Am I great at it? No, using the platform itself,” Nolan said. “But I’m figuring it out. The thing is, it’s the kids. The kids love the Snapchat.

“Now the scary thing about the kids I think we all know is that tomorrow they could completely forget about the Snapchat. So that for me is like, eh, it’s not like the television in the same sense that obviously it’s going to be here for a little bit longer than a couple of years. But Snapchat’s cool, and it’s weird.”

Nolan also thinks it’s cool that SportsCenter on Snapchat is a show that evolves. The content, pacing and tone must change along with viewing habits evolve and the latest pop-culture references.

“I think for me, the biggest takeaway about Snapchat and what’s most important and front-of-mind, what I’m working on this show, is it’s…one of the only places where you can consume media on an app that’s predominantly used for communicating with people you know,” Nolan told Deitsch.

“It’s like you open Snapchat to check your messages from your friend, and two swipes away from that is a show hosted by me or Elle Duncan or Cy Admundson or whoever, Jason Fitz, and it looks the same as a message you get from your friend. And so for me, it’s very personal in that sense.

“What I’ve learned is that the reason they’ve named it SportsCenter is because they want it to mean something to a different generation of people.”