ESPN's Mobile Strategy Is Paying Off

ESPN drove over 50 million individual mobile visitors to its website, the most of any other brand studied by MPA and comScore last month. The sports site has a winning digital strategy attracting roughly 336 million viewers to its site monthly, a number that dwarfs most other publications.

ESPN got its start in 1979 on cable, and while other cable companies have struggled to adapt to the cord-cutting world, ESPN has followed users online and on mobile, repurposing cable content for those platforms. Its mobile success comes from two important parts of its strategy: keeping the screen size and format for mobile devices in mind when producing content, and centering what the mobile audience wants. Those two central issues inform how everything from its homepage to its stories and videos appears.

Additionally, ESPN knows who it is looking to attract. Instead of focusing on any and every possible internet user and attempting to drive them to its site, the sports-centered outlet focuses on drawing in and engaging sports fans, who are far-reaching and fanatical about its content.

People in the U.S. spend over a quarter of their day with digital media, with 3.6 hours of that time spent on mobile devices. Advertisers and publishers need to follow and revamp content for those users, in order to fully benefit from how people are engaging with digital media.