ESPN: This Is What Mobile Muscle Looks LikeOct 26, 2009 1:00 PM MDT
By Steve Smith
Getting reasonable metrics from a nascent platform such as mobile is tough for publishers and for advertisers. What is the measure of success here? What constitutes a monster mobile presence? We know from Nielsen that in July there were 59 million mobile Web visits, showing a significant hike from the 42 million of July 2008. Given that context, ESPN’s latest figures for its mobile footprint are indeed impressive and evidence of first-mover advantage on a platform. According to the multi-platform sports information provider, ESPN Mobile enjoyed its best day ever in September with 8.1 million visits. But in October (11th to be exact) ESPN Mobile bested itself with an 8.5 million visitor day. Last year rumors emerged that on a given Sunday during the football season the mobile NFL page at ESPN received even more traffic than its Web counterpart. ESPN says its mobile traffic has grown 82% in visits between September 2008 and last month. For all of September, ESPN.com, the main Web site, logged 28.8 million unique users. In other words, mobile traffic is becoming a big part of the brand’s digital business.
ESPN has also been very active in the past month on the iPhone/iPod Touch platform. Its new ScoreCenter app is among the most popular media brands in the Apple ecosystem. The company says ScoreCenter has been downloaded 3 million times. While the iPhone has but a sliver of the U.S. smart phone market, its owners are voracious users of the data channel. Add to the iPhone base of about 30 million phones worldwide another 20 million iPod Touch owners who can also use apps, and the platform addresses 50 million people. ESPN says that of the 3 million who downloaded ScoreCenter, 2 million unique users accessed content with the app. More than half of the application’s owners use it at least once a week.