BRISTOL, Conn—The return of football has been good for ESPN Digital, with the operation leading the sports category in the month of September and reaching 116 million users in the U.S. That was ESPN Digital’s second-highest month ever behind January 2020 and best September on record, the company reported.
ESPN also announced that its ESPN’s lead in total minutes increased from 946 million in August to 3.7 billion in September – the largest gap since October 2017.
In addition, ESPN on YouTube reached 26.5 million unique visitors in September, the second-highest mark ever and the SportsNation YouTube channel nearly tripled its unique visitors from the previous month to 15.2 million.
In other usage data, ESPN reported that:
- The ESPN App saw 25.3 million users in September, also the second-highest mark ever behind September 2019. The Fantasy App moved into the second slot in the rankings, with 10.2 million users, also its second-highest user count behind September 2019.
- ESPN Social ranked number one in sports media across every social platform – with the most followers and the most engagements. Over the past year, ESPN Social averaged 12 million engagements and 325 million impressions per day. ESPN Social led the sports media category in actions across Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook for 12 of the past 13 months (source: Shareablee).
- ESPN Digital Live Shows drew 16.5 million total views in September. The College Football Show presented by AT&T led the way with one million views per show, up 18 percent year-over-year. Fantasy Focus Live grew by 16 percent year-over-year on YouTube, boosting the livestream of the podcast to 2.8M total views and more than 44 million minutes watched for the month.
The data was based on an ESPN Fan & Media Intelligence analysis of comScore U.S. Media Metrix Multi-Platform.
