ESPN’s ratings are slipping
Thanksgiving Thursday officially kicked off one of the great sports weekends of the year, with wall-to-wall college football and NFL games all the way until Monday night on the schedule.
It seems like the kind of weekend ESPN was made for — unfortunately, fewer and fewer people are actually watching ESPN these days. Walt Disney Corporation revealed on Wednesday that its sports network behemoth, which accounts for a huge portion of Disney’s yearly profits, has lost about 7 million subscribers since its audience peak in 2013.
It’s now back to the same numbers it had a decade ago, at 92 million subscribers. By some estimates, that could be a loss of almost $1 billion … in just two years.
ESPN has been slow to adapt to the cord-cutting trend, and its sports bundles have been the linchpin of cable subscriptions for years.
In the meantime, Disney hopes that the Star Wars franchise will make up some of the losses.
They can use all the force they can get.
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