ESPN Digital racks up best June on record

Driven by traffic to landmark events such as the MLB regular season, NBA playoffs, cricket, Euro 2020 football – which also delivered huge audiences in July – and the Mayweather v. Paul fight, the service was up 24% year-on-year in users and 132% year-over-year in minutes. ESPN Digital is now said to be averaging 98.5 million users per month in 2021, making this the best first half year on record. June marks the 40th straight month that ESPN ranked number one in the US digital sports category for monthly unique visitors.

In addition to the overall traffic for the web destination, the ESPN App saw 21 million users in June, what the company claimed was more than two-and-a-half times the size of the next closest competitor. This too marked the best June on record for the ESPN App. The ESPN App total minutes were also up 261% year-over-year.

Social also scored for the sports service with the company observing that ESPN Social ranked number one in social actions across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for the third-straight month. Quoting data from Shareablee, ESPN said a total of 361 million social actions were generated across its social accounts in June 2021. This it added was the third-consecutive month ESPN led the social sports publisher ranking.

Looking at popular individual programming, ESPN noted that across ESPN’s digital shows, Hoop Streams averaged 1.4 million views per episode during the NBA Finals, a total of 8.4 million viewers in total, up 10% from last year’s Finals, while watch time more than doubled. Hoop Streams averaged 1.1 million views per episode over the Western Conference Finals, up 25% compared with 2020 ECF. Rapid TV News