It has been an interesting year for the NFL. The sports league has seen one of the strongest bull markets of the past decade, with television ratings, attendance, and thus advertising revenue all skyrocketing in that time.
ESPN has seen steady growth over the past 50 years, with continued subscriber increases year-over-year, that is at least until recently. The entertainment sports network has seen a perplexing drop in subscribers over the past few years, and shows no signs of slowing this decline.
ESPN, one of the most recognizable names in sports entertainment, has had a rough year, with millions dropping their subscriptions and a massive layoff of some of their top talent.
Netflix, on the other hand, one of the most popular services in the world, just hit a major milestone: 100 million subscribers as of earlier this year.
At the beginning of the year, the media reported on widespread ratings decline for NFL games, citing a variety of reasons including the 2016 presidential election taking up TV time, protests from NFL players making the game seem political, and recent bad press about concussions.
We wanted to see if this ratings decline remained consistent throughout the entire season, so we pulled data on the individual ratings of every nationally broadcast regular season game, including Thursday Night Football, Sunday’s Game of the Week, Sunday Night Football, and Monday Night Football for the last three seasons.
Monday Night Football remains one of the most watched television programs of the week, and of course dominates the Monday night time slot its in.
However, just because this strong positioning remains, doesn’t necessarily mean things are going great for the network its hosted on. Earlier this week, there were reports that Nielsen showed a 600,000 subscriber drop for ESPN, one of the biggest yet.
Baseball has found itself in a bit of a lull most seasons, but every playoff season always seems to breathe some life into the sport.
The 2016 World Series was one of the most anticipated match ups in recent memory, with seemingly most of the country watching in hopes that the Chicago Cubs could break the curse. The team had not, until last night, won a World Series since the early 1900s.
Everyone has been reporting on Nielsen’s latest numbers suggesting that ESPN has lost over 600,000 subscribers.
Citing things like the rise of cord cutting, a decline in quality programming, and the NFL’s decreasing rankings, there were plenty of reasons to believe that these numbers were accurate.