ESPN’s Online Market Share

ESPN’s dominance of the digital market may not be up for debate anymore. Earlier today the company released numbers from their digital media division and ESPN boasted record highs in unique viewers, hours viewed and mobile viewers.

The press release credits the new NCAA football playoff system, NFL playoffs and the NBA specifically for the rise in traffic. ESPN claims their daily numbers beat out number two Yahoo! Sports (owned by NBC) and number three Bleacher Report even when combining the two companies’ viewership.

ESPN cites Adobe Analytics, Nielsen SocialGuide, Twitter and Instagram for their numbers, and notes 61% of their total pageviews were done via mobile. It marked the tenth consecutive month where ESPN visitors preferred to check the site via mobile.  A different web page analytic company, Quantcast shows different numbers for views on ESPN’s competition — Quantcast does not claim quantified numbers for ESPN — but the number still corroborate the preferred mobile method.

For both Bleacher Report and NBC, mobile users accounted for more traffic than those on computers. Only in the esport area did PC users outpace the mobile traffic, but given the nature of the exclusive streaming done on Twitch —no article to read, etc. —  and the ensuing mobile data prices, there’s no surprise there.

ESPN’s grasp on digital media consumption is decisive at the moment. One in three sports fans default to ESPN with not even one in seven going to second place NBC Sports. For now their title of “worldwide leader” remains accurate.

(Header image via Wikipedia)