BRISTOL, Conn.—The fall sports season has been boosting digital audiences on ESPN Digital to new records, with the company reporting 120 million unique visitors in October of 2021.
That was a new record for most unique monthly visitors in the sports category, the company reported. ESPN’s previous best month was January 2020, with 117.4 million, and the previous sports category record was 118.6 million in July 2021, ESPN said.
ESPN also reported that ESPN Digital led in total minutes, and that ESPN Digital has recorded its highest number of visitors in nine of the past 10 months.
In a further breakdown of the results, ESPN.com reached 95.2 million unique visitors, the second-highest count for the site while ESPN on YouTube set an all-time high of 29.5 million unique visitors.
SportsNation also increased its unique visitors by 32% from last month, ESPN reported and the ESPN App saw 27.3 million users in October. That was the best month ever for the app, beating the previous high of 25.4 million in September 2019.
The ESPN Fantasy App once again ranked in second place in the sports category with 10.6 million users, it’s second-highest user count behind September 2019.
In terms of social media ESPN Social led the sports category for the seventh straight month, with a total of 371.5 million social actions generated across ESPN social accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. According to Shareablee, ESPN Social continues to be the largest brand within the Walt Disney Company, representing 63% of TWDC’s total actions.
In terms of streaming, ESPN Digital Live Shows drew 24 million total views and more than 70 million minutes watched in October. This included the launch of Debatable, ESPN’s first-ever daily multi-sport live streamed show, which averaged 131,000 viewers per episode in October.
Unless otherwise noted, the data was based on DMED Sports Research analysis of comScore U.S. Media Metrix Multi-Platform data.
