I had a great customer support experience this morning with ESPN. It only took a few clicks to get on a live chat with a human being, and that human being solved my problem within ten minutes.
Great customer support experiences are always a surprise, but I was especially surprised that it happened with ESPN, a company which seems to be struggling to integrate modern logins with those from fifteen years ago, when it had an even larger presence on a very different internet. And that got me thinking.
My recollection and perception of ESPN’s last two decades is this: In the early 2000s, as desktop internet peaked in the waning smartphone-less years, ESPN’s television dominance of sports media translated naturally and directly to Internet Explorer and Safari. They responded in reasonable fashion, expanding rapidly: In 2010, I found the results from my own high school cross country meet on the ESPN website.
As the smartphone era bloomed, though, and social media took over, content consumption habits changed while barriers to entry mostly vanished. Video and audio content surged in prominence. Twitter made it possible for competing brands to build a following with next to no financial investment. ESPN found itself clumsy and lumbering in a world with more competition and a requirement to be nimble. Resources at ESPN were attached to writers, not talkers, and with revenue lagging behind investment (a hallmark of the last fifteen years of tech entrepreneurship), layoffs began. The memorable ones kicked off in 2017, but as far as I can tell, the first major round came earlier, in 2013, when 400 employees were let go, or perhaps as early as 2009, when 100 jobs were cut. Again, aside from the layoff years and numbers, this is my recollection and perception. I’m guessing a bit to fill in the gaps. But this is the story, as I understand it.
ESPN, then, has been realigning and rebounding for at least nine years, and it remains unclear if it’s been successful. Its ESPN+ subscription service’s price has risen, unless you bundle it with Disney Plus and Hulu, in which case it’s fallen. Through the streaming service, it seems to have doubled down on its original moneymaker—broadcasting live sports—while trimming its “analysis” from the hundreds of bloggers housed a decade ago to handfuls of talking heads, themselves often an entertainment product rather than a source of information. Its social media presence is, like most media outlets, only as strong as that of these content creators.
Is all of this working? It’s hard to know. Disney, ESPN’s parent company, is too large to be a barometer of its subsidiary’s health, and the details within public filings are evidently too sparse to get more than an order of magnitude when looking for details on ESPN’s annual revenue online (it seems to be either ten or eleven digits), which makes it impossible to compare in year-over-year fashion. Even if we could, I’m not sure we’d be getting the answers we want most, which are more related to the brand’s relevance in sports media taken as a whole. For millions of us, more than a decade’s worth of American children, ESPN was the central figure in our childhood love affair with sports. Now, it’s just one among many, and somehow something of a dinosaur, a phenomenon I’d imagine would be incomprehensible to viewers thirty years ago.
The end result, then, or my guess of where this leaves us, is that as one among many, ESPN is a large fleet but only one fleet, fighting in a competitive sea which pits it against everyone from Fox Sports to The Barking Crow. Habit’s grip is strong—fans still watch and love SportsCenter—but it’s fleeting. We’re entering an age in which younger sports fans did not grow up holding hands exclusively with ESPN, and that is not going to reverse course. ESPN was first. ESPN got a twenty-year head start. But when technology and consumer desire changed, this twenty-year head start turned out to not be linear, and in the ensuing realignment, progress was lost. ESPN has advantages and disadvantages, like the rest of us. It maintains its mystique. It maintains a probably sustaining capacity to broadcast live sports. But it will never again rule the sports media market like it once did. It’s one of us now.
