It's no secret that ESPN's profits are plummeting from year to year. Why is that? ESPN makes a hard turn left and ratings plummet.
When compared to last year, Disney announced that ESPN's income decreased by 11%. While Disney has been able to make several other smart business moves, this allows them to handle the collapse of ESPN. Many experts in the industry, such as Outkick the Coverage's Clay Travis, are sure that's a matter of when, not if, ESPN goes down.
Every day this year ESPN has lost 10,000 cable and satellite subscribers. That's right, per day. In 2011 ESPN was at their high with 101 million cable subscribers. That has now dropped to 87,859,000 subscribers. That's right, they are down over 13 million subscribers since 2011. So that means they are losing out on $1.3 billion dollars a year.
On top of that, ESPN has married itself to several huge yearly payments to have the rights to cover specific sports. This includes paying $1.9 billion for the rights to Monday Night Football. On top of that they pay $100 million for an additional playoff game. ESPN pays $1.47 billion to the NBA for the rights to televise their games. $700 million to MLB, $608 million for the College Football Playoff along with hundreds of millions more to cover the conference championship games in College Football.
So ESPN owes tens of billions of dollars to televise these sporting events. Most companies that begin to lose profit are able to slash expenses. ESPN is not able to do this. They are locked into these payments for years.
What mistake led to ESPN ratings plummeting? In a word, panic. ESPN has made a conscious effort to become a social justice network. All of those with liberal opinion makers have been elevated to more important roles. Those who oppose these views have been casted to the side. Every single person on ESPN unanimously agreed that Colin Kaepernick is a hero. They gave Caitlyn Jenner the Arthur Ashe Courage Award.
ESPN discounted that Conservatives are sports fans. These Conservatives are not stupid. They see what ESPN is doing. Take a look at the graphic below and you can see that sports fans are, on average, CONSERVATIVE.
Conservative Sports Fans
ESPN Makes a Hard Turn Left and Ratings Plummet
ESPN realized a while back that their business is nose diving. They made the brash move of turning their sports network into a very liberal sports network. All they are doing is expediting their own demise.
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