ESPN Lost More Than A Million Subscribers In The Last Two Months
12/01/2016 11:56 am ET
By Travis Waldron
Quote:The end of November brought another round of bad news to ESPN: the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader in Sports lost 555,000 cable subscribers during the month, according to Nielsen. It’s a big dip in the network’s customer base that followed a record-loss of 621,000 subscribers in October.
Quote:ESPN, like the broader cable industry, has been losing subscribers at a fairly regular rate ― about 300,000 per month ― over the last two years, and in a quarterly earnings report released a year ago, it admitted to losing 7 million subscribers between 2011 and 2015.
ESPN Now Costs $7.21 Per Month, Five Times More Than Any Other National Cable Channel
August 29th, 2016, 10:22 pm
By Joe DePaolo
Quote:The Chicago Tribune reports that ESPN is now charging distributors $7.21 per month per subscriber. That’s more than five times the next highest national channel, Fox News, which charges carriers a monthly rate of $1.41 per subscriber.
The first article says ESPN has been losing about 300,000 subscribers per month. That's a revenue decrease of $2,163,000 every month.
That's not a net loss of 2,163,000 each month. That an additional $2,163,000 each month.
The article said they lost a total of 7 million subscribers by the end of 2015. At $7.21 a head, they're monthly revenue was taking a $50,470,000 monthly hit. That's $605,640,000 annually.
And those numbers were 2015. If they kept losing 300,000 per month over 2016 and through 2017...
2016: 300,000 x 12 = 3,600,000
2017: 300,000 x 8 = 2,400,000
That's another 6 million lost subscribers added to the 7 million they had lost through 2015.
13,000,000 fewer subscribers at $7.21 each is $93,730,000 PER MONTH they've lost since their heydays prior to 2011.
That's an annual revenue loss of $1,124,760,000.
It's tough for practically any company to eat $1B per year.
No wonder they've been laying off staff.
And maybe that's why Disney is pulling their products from Netflix et al and starting their own streaming service.
I wonder how much they'll charge for a monthly subscription. $7.50? More?