The fight for digital sports supremacy, once tightly contested, has become a rout for ESPN.
The media giant in September posted digital audience results of 94 million unique visitors and 9.9 billion minutes of consumption, according to comScore Media Metrix Multi-Platform rankings, marking the third time in four months ESPN has set a sports category record.
In doing so, ESPN has essentially ended a back-and-forth battle it waged for years with key rivals such as the Yahoo Sports-NBC Sports digital alliance and Fox Sports for audience reach leadership. September marked the 12th time in 13th months ESPN has topped the list, and the last month also represented the second time in four months it has posted a margin of at least 20 million unique visitors over Yahoo-NBC Sports.
When ESPN in September 2013 set a comScore sports category record with 72.7 million unique visitors and 7.3 billion minutes of total digital consumption, company officials then described the totals as “staggering.” Since then, the company has increased its reach by 29 percent and its consumption by 36 percent, both well ahead of broader digital media growth marks, generally in low double-digit percentages.
To compare digital vs. TV, ESPN’s average audience per minute on digital platforms last month of 228,652 was higher than any non-ESPN cable TV sports network.
John Kosner, ESPN executive vice president for digital and print media, credited several factors for the accelerating growth, including a surging mobile audience that now represents more than half of ESPN’s total digital audience, fantasy football participation that grew 23 percent to more than 7.5 million registered players this year, major tentpole events such as this past summer’s World Cup, and a tightened internal coordination between ESPN’s sprawling print, digital, radio and television content interests.
Also contributing was a more streamlined mobile application portfolio that has seen consumers presented with fewer but more fully featured app choices from ESPN. “I think we’re simply getting better as a company,” Kosner said. “I’ve felt for a while that if we were able to execute on these areas, these kinds of numbers were possible.”
Kosner said he was particularly heartened by ESPN’s ability to increase audience directly on the heels of the World Cup, which like the Olympics typically attracts some consumers who don’t normally follow sports.
“Sometimes after a big event like the World Cup, where I really felt we reached the full potential of what’s possible at ESPN, or the Olympics, there’s a certain fatigue and audiences dip back down. But instead, we’ve built up from there,” he said.
Kosner predicted ESPN will soon surpass 100 million monthly unique visitors, but declined to pinpoint exactly when.
“Our ambitions are truly global,” he said. “But we continue to keep our eye on our [domestic] competitors. Competition makes you better. The players may change from time to time. But that competition is always going to be there.”
Several of those competitors have begun to put less stock in the monthly comScore rankings, and not just because ESPN’s ranking is now a foregone conclusion. While comScore serves as a guide for many digital ad sales, digital sports is now closely resembling TV in that each network’s proprietary content rights serve as the primary revenue driver.
“You want to be up there [in comScore]. Scale is important. But fundamentally, we’re selling against the live sports that we have, and the importance of video streaming,” said Rick Cordella, NBC Sports Group senior vice president and general manager of digital media.
