ESPN Digital Media in June: No. 1 in Sports Category for 16th Straight Month

Kevin Ota

July 28, 2015

30 percent share of sports category is more than Nos. 2 and 3 properties combined; In third month after launch, new ESPN.com reaches 51 million fans; espnW and Grantland continue growth trend with second-most uniques ever for both sites.

ESPN Digital Media reached 72.4 million unique visitors in the U.S., topping the sports category for the 16th straight month. Fans spent nearly 80 minutes per user with ESPN content across platforms, more time than any of the other top 100 properties in the sports category.

Overall, ESPN accounted for 30.3 percent of all sports category usage on digital platforms, more than the Nos. 2 and 3 properties combined (MLB had 13.8 percent, Yahoo! Sports-NBC Sports Network 10.9 percent).

The new ESPN.com garnered 50.8 million total unique visitors in the third month since launch its April 1 launch, while 37.2 million people visited the site via smartphones and tablets. 60 percent of ESPN.com users in June exclusively accessed the site on a mobile device.

More results from the June comScore Multi-Platform report:

The FIFA Women’s World Cup helped espnW notch its second-largest monthly unique visitor total ever with 7.8 million, trailing only the high set in April 2015.

Grantland followed a record setting May with its second-highest monthly unique visitor count ever with 6.9 million in June.

8 million unique users accessed ESPN web and app content on smartphones and tablets, which means more fans accessed ESPN content from mobile devices only than any other sports property attracted across all platforms. ESPN mobile visitors generated 3.4 billion minutes of usage.

67 percent of ESPN’s unique users – 48.2 million people – exclusively accessed content on smartphones and tablets. This is the 15th consecutive month that more than half of ESPN’s digital users came only from mobile devices.

58 percent of all time spent with ESPN digital content was consumed by mobile device users, the 14th consecutive month smartphones and tablets contributed a larger share of usage to ESPN’s digital total than desktop and laptop computers.

ESPN accounted for the top two sports apps on smartphones and tablets in June. The ESPN app topped the category for unique visitors with 16.2 million, and WatchESPN was second with 5.0 million.

ESPN’s portfolio of apps generated 2.0 billion minutes of usage, accounting for 36 percent of all time spent with apps in the Sports Category, 64 percent higher than the No. 2 property (MLB, 22 percent)

ESPN reached 11.6 million people per day via smartphones in June, more than the next two sports properties combined (Bleacher Report-Turner Sports Network, 4.7 million; Yahoo Sports-NBC Sports Network, 4.1 million).

In the average day in June ESPN web and app properties were accessed by 5.2 million millennial males (age 18-34) via smartphones. ESPN ranked sixth among the more than 6,000 mobile entities reported by comScore, ahead of Pandora (4.7 million), Twitter (4.5 million) and Buzzfeed (1.2 million), among many others.

Additional results from ESPN Research & Analytics:

8 million unique devices streamed WatchESPN and ESPN3 content in June, as viewers spent 989 million minutes with programming across all platforms.¹

Fans watched 359.9 million ESPN digital video clips in June across all touch points.¹

68 percent of all ESPN platform clips (305.7 million) were viewed on computers, 26 percent on phones and tablets, and 6 percent on connected TVs.¹

ESPN’s top story in June was a report about Kevin Love opting out of his deal with the Cleveland Cavaliers, which received 3.6 million views. The top four stories in June were Cavaliers-related, and eight of the top 10 stories were NBA-related.¹

ESPN networks and ABC sports television content generated 25.2 million tweets in June, accounting for nearly 40 percent of all TV-related activity during the month.²