49.6 million uniques on mobile sets new sports category record; 764 million total visits is most-ever for sports property in April; More than half of ESPN’s unique digital users accessed ESPN content exclusively on mobile devices.
Interest in the start of the NBA Playoffs and the MLB regular season powered ESPN to finish No. 1 in April across all key audience metrics in the digital sports category. ESPN reached 66.1 million unique users across computers, smartphones and tablets, an increase of 27% from a year ago. 49.6 million unique users accessed ESPN content on mobile devices, setting a category record for mobile reach and breaking the previous high ESPN set last month.
Sports fans spent 5.4 billion minutes using ESPN digital properties, a category record for the month of April. ESPN accounted for 30.1% of all sports category usage on digital platforms, more than the Nos. 2 and 3 properties combined. (Yahoo! Sports-NBC Sports Network had 12.5%, MLB 11.9%.)
Additional results from the April comScore Multi-Platform report:
- April was the 8th consecutive month in which more unique people visited ESPN on smartphones and tablets (49.6 million) than on desktop and laptop computers (32.0 million uniques, 2.8 billion minutes). 75% of ESPN’s users accessed content on mobile devices, which generated 2.6 billion minutes of usage.
- April was the first month in which more than half of ESPN’s unique digital users (52%, 34.0 million people) exclusively accessed ESPN content on smartphones and tablets. 48% of all time spent with ESPN digital content was consumed by mobile device users.
- The 81.2 minutes per user spent with ESPN digital properties during April was more than any of the top 100 sports category entities.
- In the average minute throughout April, 124,150 people used ESPN digital properties on computers, smartphones and tablets. Among men 18-49, ESPN was the ninth most-used digital property in the U.S. during the month.
Additional results from ESPN Research and Analytics:
- Fans watched 313.6 million ESPN digital video clips on ESPN platforms in April, up 24% from a year ago and the 11th straight month of year-over-year growth. 73% of clips were viewed on computers, 20% on mobile devices and 6% on connected TVs.1
- Viewers spent 482.4 million minutes with WatchESPN and ESPN3 live and on-demand programming across all platforms, up 97% from April 2013. 3.3 million unique devices streamed WatchESPN and ESPN3 content.1
ESPN networks and ABC sports television content generated 15 million tweets in April, accounting for 20% of all TV-related activity during the month. ESPN itself was the second most-social TV network (broadcast or cable) with 1.8 million unique users sending 7.1 million tweets about ESPN programming.2 Other key social media metrics:
- ESPN counted more than 30 million unique followers across Twitter accounts in April and had 32 million unique fans across ESPN Facebook pages.
- ESPN’s Twitter accounts were retweeted or favorited 10.6 million times, up 7% from March.3
- 58 million people were reached by SportsCenter page content on Facebook, 45 million by ESPN page content.4
- 7.5 million people engaged with the SportsCenter Facebook page (liked a post, shared a story, left a comment), and 4.5 million also engaged with the ESPN page.4
- ESPN videos were viewed 36.3 million times on YouTube. 5
1 Source: Adobe Analytics
2 Source: Nielsen SocialGuide
3 Source: Twitter
4 Source: Facebook
5 Source: YouTube
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