ESPN and the NFL can continue to tolerate and support anti-American demonstrations, but they will continue to feel the financial pain. Week 8 of the NFL season and TV viewership is down by 24%.
Traditionally not strange bedfellows, ESPN and Monday Night Football should make for a nice, natural fit. However, the bed they made together appears to have caught fire, and the anthem-kneeling, social-justice-warrior love child they created now dumps gasoline on the flames.
Nielsen made their subscriber numbers public, delivering apocalyptic results for both ESPN and the NFL. ESPN lost 621,000 subscribers in the last month, and ESPN’s Monday Night Football fell by 24%.
To put this in context, ESPN lost the entire city of Baltimore, or the combined populations of Lexington, Kentucky and Stockdale, California, in a month.
That’s fairly impressive when you think about it.
The subscriber loss represents the worst in ESPN history, made all the worse since ESPN has essentially lost 300,000 subscribers a month over the past few years anyway. The tanking of Monday Night Football helps not at all. The end result of all this that ESPN loses $52 million dollars in revenue.
Now, to qualify, subscribers dropped across all cable providers, not just ESPN. However, as Fox Sports 1’s Clay Travis notes, “It just impacts ESPN the most because ESPN costs every cable and satellite subscriber roughly $7 a month, over triple the next most expensive cable channel. Yep, if you have a cable or satellite subscription, whether you watch ESPN or not, you’re paying ESPN over $80 a year.”
Some really big positives for conservatives jump out immediately. First and foremost, the world’s largest and most liberal sports network took a big hit, perhaps not a fatal one, yet wounded nonetheless. The other positive for conservatives has to do with ESPN’s expected reaction to these subscriber losses. ESPN makes its money from sports rights.