Can ESPN go local? Or is this rival sniping?

I'd bet on the four-team markets (MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL) with significant college teams all winding up in time with their own ESPN[blank] sites. No?

 

Some of the city sites are not making money. Even LeBron wouldn't make ESPN-Miami profitable at this point.

 

What leads you to conclude that some of the city sites are not profitable?

 

I did some reporting with sources at ESPN. It's not much of a secret.

 

If it's not much of a secret, what are the numbers and figures they gave you?

 

I heard from an editor at a paper in a city where ESPN had moved in that the World Wide Leader was cooking the numbers a bit when claiming they were getting ridiculous amounts of hits on the local sites. For example, if I was looking at the college football page on ESPN.com and clicked on a blog post about an upcoming Minnesota-Northwestern football game, it might take me to ESPNChicago and ESPN's bean counters would chalk me up as a unique visitor to ESPNChicago whether I even realized I visited that site or not.

 

You mean like a sports story getting a link on my paper's homepage?

 

Not sure you can call that 'cooking the numbers.'

 

Ice9: No, they didn't open the books for me. That doesn't mean they were lying to me, either.

What was the last local site to roll out? When is the next one? Don't hold your breath.

 

I get your point, but I don't know if it's really the same thing. ESPNDallas gets hits from guys in Sacramento and Madison who go to ESPN.com for the NFL coverage and the links just happen to take them to a story dealing with the Cowboys. That's fine, but what was rubbing the editor I talked to the wrong way was that ESPN was acting like local DFW readers where choosing ESPNDallas over the local papers' sites, which wasn't necessarily true. (*disclaimer - the guy I talked to was in another city, I just used Dallas as an example).

 

So what's the problem with someone in Sacramento who's a Dallas Cowboys fan and visits the Dallas site for news on the Cowboys? Same for a Lakers fan in Madison who visits the LA site for news on the Lakers? Just because someone doesn't live in the city doesn't diminish the value of the click or the visit. Traffic is traffic on the worldwide web.