Unless you live under a rock or are you’re some strange visitor from Mars, you’ve probably heard of this little thing called ESPN. The global cable televison network was founded by Bill and Scott Rasmussen and Ed Eagan in 1979 under the direction of CEO and eventual first commissioner of the United States Football League Chet Simmons.
Funded with money from, you guessed it, an oil company – The Getty Oil Company – ESPN has become one of sports and the world’s business superpowers on television, radio and alike.
With the worldwide boom in smartphones and tablets, social media sites are being visited more then ever before and ESPN is well aware of this, having created 13 different mobile applications to go along with their already popular content and fantasy websites. To say they are dominating the sports social media scene is an understatement.
A recent story about social media in the business section of USA Today showed the top ten websites that users spend their time on. Low and behold, Facebook.com came in at number one with powerhouses Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL in the top five respectively.
But it was ESPN who came in at number ten, which is pretty impressive considering that of the top ten, it is the sole company representing one niche audience. Sports. There are tons of places to get your sports fix, yet ESPN not only remains competitive, but can out duel everyone and has managed to become one of the most visited websites in the world.
So how do they do this?
They increased their digital reach by 56% creating new, up to the minute sports applications such as their SportsCenter Feed and also improved their already popular applications, such as fantasy baseball and football, to provide a smooth running experience for their users.
The simple formula combined with big bucks led to the increase in digital reach and overall their visitors grew by an astounding 59%, second in yearly growth only to Pandora Media. 34.6 million mobile users visited ESPN through their applications, which is a ridiculous number. Combine that with the 38.7 million desktop visitors of their sites and you’ve got a successful online media presence.
ESPN is doing things right in the sports social media world and should only continute to see their stock rise. Maybe one day we’ll see them in the top spotof websites visited?
Photo Credit: twitter.com
ESPN has played a crucial role in Canadian sport coverage despite not being able to get the coverage here in Canada. We often find Canadian TSN grabbing U.S ESPN feeds.
Well done!