“We felt that this group of people would drive additional subscriptions, while also making existing subscribers happier and more engaged,” said ESPN vp of digital content Nate Ravitz.

ESPN wouldn’t say how many new subscribers can be attributed to the repositioning. Ravitz says the company hasn’t seen much impact on traffic. “We expected to drive incremental subscriptions, we expected to see people who had streamed but not read start to read, and we’ve seen subscribed readers read more articles than they were before,” he said.

ESPN+ now boasts more than 12.1 million subscribers, as of Jan. 2, up from 11.5 million in December. It’s benefited from its place in the larger Disney ecosystem; the launch of a bundled offering alongside Disney+ and Hulu late in 2019 coincided with ESPN+ nearly doubling its subscriber count, from 3.5 million to 6.6 million, in under two months.

“I think they’ve been much more successful in terms of attracting subscribers than most people expected,” said Macquarie analyst Tim Nollen.

The changes at ESPN occur as freely available, long-form sports writing grows increasingly scarce. VC-funded subscription site The Athletic has spent the last five years luring writers from sports sections all over the country. WarnerMedia’s Bleacher Report shut down its ad-supported long-form unit in August. Internally, some ESPN writers have reportedly expressed concern that placement behind a paywall would limit their audience.

“Our response was that first and foremost, the company was totally committed to this new DTC strategy, so they were part of something that was deemed extremely important,” said Ravitz, who acknowledged the shift would impact articles’ reach “particularly in the short term.”

News and investigative pieces remain available to non-subscribers. In addition to Ravitz’s philosophy that matters of public interest should be free, ESPN’s site and mobile app help to bring in free audiences that can be converted to paid subscribers.

In December 2020, ESPN’s site and mobile app received 88.6 million unduplicated users in the U.S., down 5% year over year and down 5% compared to October 2020 — the last full month before more content was moved behind the paywall — according to Comscore.

“One of the beauties of the DTC business is we get to use data and analytics on a daily basis to see what’s working,” said ESPN+ evp and gm Russell Wolff. …read more

Source:: Digiday