ESPN's sacrifice to the blood Gods today has us all thinking about the future of the world wide leader..
The truth of the matter is: I'm apart of the problem, well not this crappy blog but people like me. B/R,BarStool, Busted Coverage we've saturated the sports market, to varying decries of journalistic integrity. Clickbait headlines draw traffic and interest. The ESPN version of clickbait (Skip, Smith, etc) are a byproduct of the TV product going away from real journalism and just embracing "sports debate culture"
The TV product is incredibly crappy for a variety of reasons. I really don't want to sit through TMZ style gossip reporting. The PTI/Around The Horn style of fast paced discussion while once unique are now incredibly over done and done so poorly. ESPN is now dominated by this format if you watch one version of these shows, you've pretty much seen them all.
Content is king, always has been. We just have a lot more access to content now. I can read a treatise on hockey, the NBA playoff and the NFL draft with simple twitter search. A decade ago with the rise of the internet ESPN.com was still king, now in 2017 it's clunky and ad infessted.
Cable Cost: It's expensive. People are broke, with technology these days you can watch anything really without a subscription
Overpaying for content: How's that Longhorn Network deal doing? That expensive NFL contract isn't helping either.
Politics: There is discussion that ESPN is too left wing, I think it's an overrated factor but ignoring it entirely is foolish. There likely is some finite number of people whose final straw with cable was some political stance some ESPN tar took on twitter or tv but that actual number isn't great enough to account for everyting.. Cable is hemorrhaging subscribers in general. I do believe however. we all can concede that politicization may cause a bigger decrease in viewers of ESPN(or individual programs) . Viewership is important because of Ad rates. It's all connected.
ESPN killed the Golden Goose, their switch away from sports journalism lead to the rise of the hot take clickbait that is actively killing them today because of the explosion in technology and social media .ESPN is victims of their own success really, they were able to charge a high subscription rate at one time because you HAD to go to ESPN for sports. You can find any game online these days, highlights are a twitter search away and you can read the hot takes of B/R and Bar Stool with single clicks - ESPN as a network isn't really necessary if you're tech savvy. ESPN needs to figure out how to hold onto existing viewers without alienating them for whatever reason. The other elephant in the room is subscription costs and the amount of money they are paying out for content.
