Sports and Marketing: Whats ESPN Doing?
May 19th, 2006 by Casey
Can anyone tell me why ESPN is putting all their content behind Insider. This is the service that you have to pay to read thier featured articles. I thought they sold advertising? I rarely go to ESPN because everytime i do find something interesting (not the normal AP stuff as Cuban writes here) they have it hidden behind this Insider crap. I can go to a thousand other sites to get the info and see ads running next to them, why is ESPN limiting their content to people when the more content they provide the more ads they can push. Instead of loosing readers they would be gaining. They may be generating some revenue from this but I would guess its going to hurt their image and annoy their readers.
I have found a pretty good and amusing Sportssite called Deadspin and looking for others that will fullfill my needs. ESPN has the content, the infastructure but they are in my eyes short sighted and killing their reader base, I just took them out of my favorites a few weeks back. Im sure others have done the same. Such a pity.
On another note have you heard the NFL network is moving into college football, ESPN here comes some competition!