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This according to comScore. And now ESPN is looking to tackle Dallas, Los Angeles and New York City.
ESPN Chicago now the #1 sports Web site in town
nytimes.com - 15 weeks ago - 1136 views
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...And on the heels of all this, drumroll please! ESPN Chicago is hiring: https://disney.recruitmax.com/main/careerportal/Job_Profile.cfm?szOrderI...
It asks "Are you one of us?" right at the top (creepy!) and also stipulates that the applicant "Should have a basic appreciation of popular culture, e.g., 'what’s cool'"
Step right up folks and work for the #1 sports website in Chicago ;-)
Heh, "One of Us!" But, seriously...do you think they offer health insurance?
Hmmm, good question. You would think the answer would be yes since this is a GIANT company (Disney), but then again it's not mentioned in the posting and most of the time they put that stuff in there. Maybe this is strategic: they don't want just some shmo who needs benefits, but a young, hungry youth willing to work for a pittance and nothing more. That would be in line with most media jobs nowadays.
Anyone remember ChicagoSports.com from the Trib? :)
Hahaha, I do and I remember the people I talked to hating it. Must have been a popular sentiment since now it just redirects to http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/
Not ringing a bell with me, and that's probably the way the Trib would like it.
I heard Bill Adee talk about it a while back. He mentioned that one of the reasons the plug was pulled on it was that they couldn't monetize it very well, since a lot of traffic was not local.
ESPNChicago seems to have solved the problem.
Holy cow this story is annoying. Is the Times reprinting press releases from Disney?
Facts:
1. ESPN.com has a massive, international sports audience. It reaches 13 million people a month according to Quantcast (I think the fluctuating numbers in that graph may be due to them adding subdomains, which may not be tracked in this metric).
2. ESPN can send those people anywhere they want just by reconfiguring their web site and promoting different links. 13 million people. That's more than 400,000 unique visitors per day.
Note: By the same measurement, the Tribune reaches just 1.9 million people per month, or just over 60,000 unique visitors per day.
Companies complain about Quantcast lowballing their numbers all the time. I've seen it with the Citizen, so assume it's probably true. Still, these are large numbers.
3. ESPN.com has a hugely popular cable television network that consists of several popular channels broadcasting 24 hours a day. If I'm reading these numbers right, at any given time between February 4-10 of 2008, 700,000 people were watching ESPN on TV.
-ESPN is owned by Disney, one of the largest, most powerful media companies on the planet. The own ABC one of the handful of broadcast networks that anyone in the U.S. can see if they get TV.
With all these advantages, and with a fairly large marketing budget for their new "site," how can they brag about reaching 590,000 people?
Consider this: Chicagoist reaches 120,000 people/month with one paid employee and a bunch of volunteer writers. And that number's well off what I estimate their real monthly traffic to be.
Congratulations, Disney, you've proven you can redirect traffic around your mega properties to create something 4x larger than the local Gothamist blog.
Also, consider this:
This new Chicago "site" is not actually a site, it's just a category page on ESPN.com (with 13 million visitors/month) that they're calling a web site. They've had those for years and years and years. When you go to ESPNChicago.com, you're redirected to espn.go.com/chicago. ESPN.com has had topic pages since it launched over a decade ago, the only difference is marketing.
Conclusion: These numbers don't mean a whole lot and certainly don't show that ESPNChicago.com has become the top destination for Chicago sports news.
If you ask Quantcast how many people visit ESPNChicago.com, guess what it tells you? "Not enough data to profile the site"
http://www.quantcast.com/profile/no-data-for-site?domain=espnchicago.com
And if you ask Compete.com?
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/espnchicago.com/
11,708 unique monthly visitors.
That number sounds pretty accurate for describing how many people actively sought out the new URL.
ESPN people might wave their hands and say that these sites aren't accurate due to how the new site is structured...well guess what? If your site's not structured like a site...maybe it's not a site and it's just a category page dressed up to look like a site and score some easy headlines from the New York Times.
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Now, numbers aside, if ESPN is going to go after the local ad market, that's news. And if they succeed in signing away local advertisers from the Trib and Sun-Times. That's news. But to applaud one of the most powerful corporations on the planet for shuffling its resources around to make it look like they're reaching 590,000 people in Chicago (and I bet less than half of those people actually live in the Chicagoland area) is silly.
Juked stats or not, the real attention should be paid to where the money's going -- advertisers money.
With stats like that, ESPN isn't going for local ad dollars. They're going after national advertisers and taking that money away from local content providers.
If I'm a national advertiser who wants to start a campaign in a metro area, ESPN(Local) looks attractive as an online play for two reasons: 1.) Location specific and 2.) High traffic.
Sure, there's money in local ads, but why bother with that lower number when you can go after a larger audience and grab bigger ad dollars? I don't think it's a local play at all against the Tribune's local ad revenue, but rather an attempt to secure a place for national ad dollars that are more targeted.
That's what's happening here. They're looking to create channels for brands looking to hit specific cities.
It'll probably work just fine. ESPN knows how to sell. Part of that sale, however, will include a promise that "we're the #1 destination for Chicago sports fans on the web," and my point is that that's just not true based only on unique visitors.
That said, to an advertiser, who cares?
Hey -- if you're getting your impressions...
And if it's not your money...
True true. But what if they're not converting because your audience is a Frankenstein assembled by webmasters? See comment below (http://www.windycitizen.com/chicago/sports/2009/07/21/espn-chicago-now-1...)
ESPN is being extremely smart here. This could be a great move for them. I just want to take issue with the NYTimes christening them the top sports news site for Chicago.
With respect, Brad, I clicked over from the gmail link because you said an assertion was not true (my interpretation of "bunk"). Did you mean something else by "bunk"? Or did I miss your refutation of the assertion? With respect, not snark.
Ken Novak
owns no media stock; has never worked for Disney, ESPN, etc.
Was referring to the NYTimes' assertion that the ESPN site is the top Chicago sports destination based on a comScore report saying it reached 590,000 people. That could very well be the case, but I don't think it follows directly from the numbers, as I explain above.
Brad, I see your logic there, but the whole "it's not a site by itself" argument could be negligible. I mean, just because it doesn't have all its content sitting on a unique domain, does that not make it a "site"?
Maybe the better term is "destination".
Taking the ESPN example further, you could actually argue that traffic is much higher than it is just for ESPN.com, because ESPN itself isn't a standalone site either... like all Disney properties, it uses the old school Go.com core domain, primarily to enable universal login/profile ability across all online properties of the Mouse. Thus, using that logic, one could argue that ESPN's "subset" of traffic doesn't count either, as it's sharing the same "site" as the theme parks, ABC, Disney Channel, etc.
Exactly. Basically, any traffic numbers for Disney-owned subsites, even data sent from comScore, which is considered one of the top analytics outfits, should be treated with skepticism. Simply getting 590,000 uniques to their "site" does not mean it's now "the city's top sports site." Disney could tweak a few links across their properties to drop a million visitors on anything it likes.
There was a recent spate of press around an announcement that AOL's new Politics site, Politics Daily, had in short order leapfrogged established players like Politico. Here's the TechCrunch write-up of the press release: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/20/aols-politicsdaily-quickly-surpasse...
As TC's commenters point out, that traffic's likely all coming from AOL deciding to point its immense audience over to the new site. AOL's always had political news and analysis. But now instead of publishing it at AOL.com/politics or something like that, and pushing it there, they've come up with a brand and are pushing that. It makes for great headlines to say your new site is so awesome that it's decimating Politico, but it's being accomplished through semantics and slight of hand.
Brad, I'm so happy this discussion is taking place. I buy advertising for one of my clients and have bought on ESPN radio before, which included running a :30 spot before one of the videos on the Chicago ESPN SportsCenter edition. I was pleased with my spot runs but not so pleased with the results. I thought I could get better value elsewhere.
The interesting thing was my ESPN radio sales rep has been hounding me to buy more ad time on radio and the website. He then sent me a link to the NYTimes article on Monday.
Aside from the flawed measurements that everyone has pointed out, the thing that is funny for me is that every media outlet who sells advertising says it is #1 in something. To me, this was just the latest chest-beating on behalf of media.
The fact that the NYTimes reported on this though is truly amazing!
I don't think it's so big a stretch considering:
- it was a story that appeared in the business section
- ESPN will be launching a local NY portal
- it's ESPN
True. This is definitely news. I'm certainly eating this up. The question is what exactly is the news?
I think one big picture takeaway is that the media giants are getting smarter about audience segmentation. They're creating new sub-brands that they can pitch as standalone entities to advertisers.
TMZ would be a perfect example. It started as a blog on AOL's network but has grown so influential and well-known that they just announced they were taking ad sales in-house. If that's not a first for an AOL mini-property, it has to at least be a rare occasion.
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-tmz-brings-ad-sales-in-house-with-tel...
Sales reps' entire life is about bugging people to buy more ad time/space :-)
And yeah, you might be able to get better value elsewhere, sure. Just like a woman shopping for shoes can get a better value from DSW than Nordstrom. But like people have pointed out, it's somewhat about the brand. And even if a brand actually HAS greater value than its less well-known or unknown competitors, they can conflate that disparity even more to maintain their elite position. Like with so many other things, perception is reality.
Hey Jesse, great to hear from you. Thanks for the inside scoop on the ad situation. I don't blame for trying to sell you guys at all. That's their job! I wonder if the Times knows it's piece is being used to sell pre-roll video ads. Probably.
So I'm still unclear: 1) Is ESPN Chicago the No. 1 sports Web site in Chicago? 2) If not, what is?
According to general Web traffic, comScore says it is. But we don't know if these #s come from stories tagged "chicago," if it's traffic to the ESPN Chicago main page, if the traffic is from a LOCAL audience, etc.
Interesting. So it sounds like ESPN has the site focused on Chicago sports with the most readers...but that they could replicate that in every other U.S. city with a flick of a switch in a week or so by shifting around their traffic and stories.
Weird that NYT never asked ESPN how much local traffic it gets. Surely ESPN has those numbers.
Numbers, site traffic and metrics aside, it's interesting to look at actual content. This comment from the original story sums ESPN up nicely.
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