Don't worry. They'll fire the white males first.
ESPN's experiment in social justice programming isn't going well. Its business model was probably unsustainable anyway. But alienating its core viewers by pushing left-wing politics really didn't help. ESPN is blaming rising costs and cord cutters, and the always popular villain, the internet, but the bottom line is that the viewers just aren't there.
Like the rest of Disney, ESPN began pushing a social agenda hard. Most of the rest of Disney has gotten away with it. Beauty and the Beast made plenty of money while blatantly embedding a social agenda into a live action adaptation of a children's cartoon. But sports fans aren't 11-year-old girls.
And so now the purge is beginning.
ESPN president John Skipper sent out a memo to employees Wednesday morning alerting them that 100 employees will be laid off. Around half of those receiving pink slips are well known, according to James Miller, author of the ESPN behind-the-scenes book “These Guys Have All the Fun.”
The layoffs were expected for months, but according to Miller, some are still in shock as they are notified they are among the ones being let go.
Ed Werder, a prominent on-camera NFL reporter, shared on Twitter that he was fired.
Don't worry. He'll be replaced with three bloggers who will blog about social justice in sports. But the meteor is still coming.
"If you could save $8 per month by removing ESPN and ESPN2 from your cable or satellite package, would you do it?"
"If ESPN and ESPN2 were only available as a standalone service like Netflix, would you pay $20 per month to subscribe?"More than half of respondents, 56%, said they would be willing to not have the ESPN channels if they could shave $8 a month off their cable bill. Only 6% of those surveyed said they would be willing to pay $20 a month for a standalone ESPN service.
ESPN will focus harder on the internet, but that only does so much good considering how much less profitable the internet is and the costs of ESPN's monopolies.
Disney blamed its struggling sports channels for its 2% drop in Q2 revenue in its cable networks division, where operating income also fell by 11%.
"The decrease in operating income was due to a decrease at ESPN," the company wrote in its earnings release. "The decrease at ESPN was due to higher programming costs and lower advertising revenue, partially offset by affiliate revenue growth."
The good news is that if Disney sees enough losses from ESPN, it may decide to move on. But the left tends to accept financial losses when they run companies to pursue a political agenda. And they have various ways to sell higher execs on it. Usually involving claims that money needs to be spent to lock in a younger audience.
SportsCenter is only part of the problem. ESPN has lost more than 12 million subscribers since 2011, according to Nielsen, and the viewership erosion seems to be accelerating. Last fall, ESPN lost 621,000 subscribers in a single month, the most in the company’s history.
As subscribers leave the network, and often cable altogether, ESPN is stuck with rising costs for the rights to broadcast games. Programming costs will top $8 billion in 2017, according to media researcher Kagan. Most of that money goes to rights fees through deals that extend into the next decade.
Some channels get paid more than others, and ESPN gets the most. Carriers pay an average of $7.21 per month for every customer who gets ESPN as part of a bundle, according to Kagan. Fox News, by comparison, gets $1.41; Bravo, 30¢.
With almost 90 million homes still getting ESPN, that adds up to $7.8 billion per year. Sister channel ESPN2 chips in an additional billion, and that’s all before ad revenue (roughly $2.6 billion a year, according to Kagan)
You can see where the math gets edgy. If customers finally win the ability to choose an ESPN-free package, the number turn very red, very fast. And even without them, ESPN is in free fall.