ESPN reportedly lost 555,000 subscribers this month, according to sports writer Clay Travis.
The drop in November for the sports media company comes right after its worst-ever month, when it lost an estimated 621,000 subscribers in October.
Writing for Outkick the Coverage, Travis reported:
[T]he worst month in the history of ESPN has now been followed up by the second worst month in ESPN history. ESPN has now lost a jawdropping 1.176 million subscribers in the past two months.
Putting that into perspective, that means nearly 20,000 people a day are leaving ESPN for each of the past two months.
If that annual average subscriber loss continued, ESPN would lose over seven million subscribers in the next 12 months. And at an absolute minimum, these 1.176 million lost subscribers in the past two months will lead to a yearly loss in revenue of over $100 million.
According to Nielsen ESPN now has 88.4 million cable and satellite subscribers, a precipitous decline from well over 100 million subscribers just a few years ago.
Now, to be fair, ESPN fought Nielsen’s latest channel estimates last month and argued that those estimates failed to count the number of over-the-top subscribers the company has, but Nielsen reviewed their data and confirmed its findings, much to ESPN’s public dismay. Furthermore, there’s nothing preventing ESPN from revealing its subscriber data publicly. What’s more, ESPN cited Nielsen’s own subscriber estimates in its most recent 10k filing last week. If the subscriber numbers were that far off would you cite them in your own public releases for the Securities and Exchange Commission? That seems unlikely.
The rapid decline – and apparent escalation – in cable and satellite customers abandoning the bundle is the biggest story in sports, and there isn’t a close second.
It’s probably worth noting that the precipitous decline in subscriptions comes amid criticism that ESPN has become too political in recent years. The sports network raised eyebrows in April, for example, when it fired former major league pitcher and commentator Curt Schilling after he posted a cartoon to Facebook criticizing the pro-transgender side of the bathroom law debate.
“Before that, it was ESPN’s decision to present the recently-transitioned Caitlyn Jenner with its annual Arthur Ashe Courage Award — considered ‘one of the most prestigious in sports’ — that sparked controversy,” Parker Lee wrote for IJ Review in an article titled, “How ESPN Went From America’s Sport Network to That Guy in the Bar Who Won’t Shut Up About Politics.”
The network isn’t totally oblivious to the role that politics has played in its recent coverage, and it has commented publicly about the issue in the past.
Whether the recent decline in subscriptions is motivated more by the supposedly political tone of its coverage or by the growing trend of Americans simply moving away from cable bundles is yet be determined. But if it’s the former, and if subscriptions continue to trend downward, the network may find itself changing its tune real fast.
