Posted on 05/02/2018 6:58:49 AM PDT by EdnaMode
It’s become a major trend, when tax season arrives, cable and satellite subscriber numbers tank according to Nielsen estimates. I don’t know if that’s because come spring tax season everyone looks at their yearly budgets and many people, in an effort to save money, decide they don’t need cable and satellite subscriptions any longer, or whether the end of the NFL, college football, and college basketball causes many sports fans to tune out for the summer. But regardless of the reason cord cutting in the spring has become an annual trend
And the start of this spring was brutal for ESPN, costing the network 500,000 subscribers, or nearly 17,000 lost subscribers a day in the month of April. Putting that into context, this is $48 million in revenue that ESPN has lost forever. (That’s $8 a month x 500,000 lost subscribers x 12 months in a year).
The loss in subscribers puts ESPN down to just north of 86 million, which is a precipitous decline from the 100 million subscribers the network had as recently as the end of 2011. While the numbers of lost subscribers haven’t been as bad in the past few months, I suspect that’s because ESPN threw such a fit over last year’s numbers that Nielsen slowed down its subscriber attrition data for several months to make sure they weren’t off in their data measurements.
The result with the latest numbers?
A cable and satellite subscriber bloodbath.
Since whenever I post one of these updates there’s an inevitable cry, what about FS1 and NBSN and NFL Network, here are those numbers in a Tweet below.
@SportsTVRatings just got a glimpse of the May cable coverage estimates (which includes telco, satellite and at least some of the streaming services). Carnage might be a little strong. A little.
@SportsTVRatings ESPN: -500K households FS1: -328K households Golf Channel: -505K NBCSN: -544K NFLN: -842K (Comcast kicked it up a tier with the Fox TNF news)
(By the way, now that I’ve linked this subscriber info in the article, I encourage you to respond to people who ask questions without reading articles and call them what they are — idiots.)
Interestingly, the NFL Network fell victim to its decision to take Thursday night football to Fox. As a result Comcast, which owns NBC, the network that aired half of Thursday night football, knocked the NFL Network down into a lower programming tier, shaving nearly a million subscribers off the channel’s subscriber base. Given that the NFL Network makes around $1.20 a month in subscriber fees, that means the NFL gave up over $12 million a year in lost NFL Network subscriber revenue to switch Thursday night football to Fox.
The larger story here remains that ESPN, which is the most expensive channel on cable by far, loses more than any other channel with cord cutting because their revenue takes the biggest hit. That’s easy to illustrate by using FS1 as an example. FS1 brings in roughly $1 a month in subscriber fees so losing 328,000 subscribers would cost it just shy of $4 million total a year. Whereas ESPN 500,000 lost subscribers cost it $48 million a year.
Given that ESPN costs three times what every other channel costs — and given the substantial fixed rate costs involved with its insanely overpriced and paid sports programming schedule — the network needs to be saving money wherever it can.
So it’s probably a good thing the network isn’t spending $35 million a year on a brand new New York City studio and paying three people $15 million a year to host a show whose ratings are declining by 20% over the much cheaper show they replaced.
Wait…
Maybe they need to sign Peppa Pig instead.
At least they’re politically correct. LOL!!!
Why bother with cable and satellite when there is Hulu Plus
and Amazon Prime.
Absolutely! Clearly they’ve lost viewership because they aren’t far enough left and are not strident enough pushing their agenda down the viewers’ throats!
Normally I NEVER watch ESPN.
Unfortunately they now are the new providers of Formula 1 coverage.
On a lighter note the races have been recorded on the DVR in the wee hours of the morning and said races have been televised without commercials (at least in my area). No commercials, seemingly no revenue...
ESPN, the Extreme Socialist Propaganda Network, is unwatchable in all its incarnations.
LOL! Every April 15th brings a discussion of one's cable bill!!! The Agenda keeps them from discussing reality.
I still like sports, but won't pay extra to the espn creeps....and watching baseball and golf is just boring to me...and not really into the nba at all...
Every time I see one of these articles, it always singles out ESPN as losing viewers. Wouldn’t that be indicative of all cable subscribers, and not specifically ESPN. I buy a cable package, and ESPN is part of that package. I can’t choose to exclude ESPN from my package, though I would, as it’s wholly unwatchable these days.
That’s the perfect name for them.
More left wing propaganda is needed to improve ratings.
If you go out in red-states....you can find rural Democrats who did watch college and pro-football. But even those folks are fed up with politicized sport news.
You have to wonder six to eight years ago, when they started this agenda, if there was a gameplan or just some speech that you could go that far.
Just looking at the numbers...I would say that ESPN probably has at best six months to clean up the mess, or get bought out with pennies on the dollar.
April is a horrible month for us...our house insurance, two car insurancs, and property tax, which went up $600 this year....all due in April...thank God we got a refund on our income taxes..
And that’s not counting the monthly drain of the longhorn network. A long term contract they are stuck with.
Could ESPN be included as part of a sports tier that is optional for some cable subscribers?
Same here.
I do miss David Hobbs, Steve Matchett & Leigh Diffey.
I get ESPN on Youtube TV. I don’t watch it though. When football season starts that’s different. How does one get rid of it when it’s part of a package, like Al Gore’s? Lol.
I get ESPN on Youtube TV. I don’t watch it though. When football season starts that’s different. How does one get rid of it when it’s part of a package, like Al Gore’s? Lol.
My wife and I were discussing this last night. NASCAR is the only sport I follow. Since I’ve never had cable, I end up missing over half the races because NASCAR’s broadcast contract has them on FS1 and NBCSN. With so many cutting cable I wonder how that affects their revenue.
Viewership is really down. How much is loss of interest. Vs loss of cable subscribers?
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