ESPN.com Local Sites

I quickly tried a few and ESPN followed by Pittsburgh, Denver, Seattle, Florida, Miami, StLouis, Cleveland and Cincinnati all direct you either to a local ESPN Radio affiliate, the national ESPN radio site or the ESPN homepage.

 

What you want to do is go to an inteernet registry site (Network Solutions is the easiest) and see which cities they've camped on. ESPNNashville, just to pull one out of thin air, was created Jan. 17, 2009. Owner? ESPN Inc., Bristol, Conn.

 

I think ESPN planned to expand quickly, but they haven't found as much success as planned. Put the brakes on.

 

I'd implore you to check the numbers. Maybe there's no plan to expand, but the local sites are posting record numbers for traffic.

 

Personally, I go to ESPN Boston quite often, especially after they took Reiss and Edes.

 

You don't actually know what the hell you're talking about, do you?

 

Nate41 does know exactly what he is talking about. ESPN was all jazzed about doing a bunch of local sites. Some of the sites get a ton of traffic. Do they make money? Not really.

How do we know this is true? Sources at ESPN confirm it. More importantly, if the local sites were making money, ESPN would be trying to roll out a new one every month instead of -- as Nate41 writes --- hitting the brakes.

 

Thanks for the compliment, but that was Mulligan, not me. When I saw my name and "knew exactly what he's talking about," I knew something had to be amiss.

 

A) Since you're apparently so well-sourced to know this kind of privileged information us feudal serfs can only dream about...can you be more specific than just something speculative like "not really"?
B) The ESPN Local traffic in those five markets goes toe-to-toe with the big boys, and in at least one city gets twice as many unique visitors as the paper of record's sports section. Now, does that generate enough dough to keep the suits happy? We can agree to disagree, but we need to wake up and cut the crap with this myth that the five ESPN local sites are just circling the drain. They're not.

 

No, they're not circling the drain but they're not making a lot of money, either. Obviously, they are not getting enough new ad revenue to adequately surpass the costs. You also have to remember that they went to the most lucrative markets first. So they have done the math and said it's not yet time to do ESPN.Arizona.com or whatever. Just because you have a lot of traffic doesn't mean you make a lot of money --- isn't that the case with many newspaper web sites?

 

Maybe I'm missing them, but I don't see a ton of local ads on these sites. I see a lot more house ads for ESPN/Disney products.

They get a lot of traffic, but if an NBA fan in Memphis clicks on a link from the ESPN homepage to see rankings of the top 10 players in the NBA playoffs and it takes you to ESPNChicago.com because Rose is No. 1 (a totally made up example, but they do that kind of thing) is that kind of traffic appealing to advertisers, particularly local ones?