Sports dominated this week. EURO 2020 finals (soccer), NBA finals (basketball), MLB All-Star game (baseball), and a UFC fight (that carried a lot of trash talk before and after) kept many different audiences engaged. It should come as no surprise that there was a lot of demand for streaming all of these, and guess which app had it all?
ESPN.
That's why this weekend was ESPN's biggest in revenue, and by a lot!
Net revenue in the U.S. this weekend (7/10-11) added up to $3,000,000, according to our estimates. What's more interesting is the split between stores. We'd expect the App Store to be responsible for a considerable chunk of that total, but the weekend was almost even. The App Store was responsible for 54% and Google Play for 46%, indicating demand for sports is very strong across the board. Not really surprising, but it's nice to see it in numbers.
The big deal: This weekend out-revenued all other weekends since the app started earning directly with in-app purchases. Streaming sports is not just a lockdown activity but rather a super convenient way to consume more content. That's right, sports is content just as much as a movie is these days.
Think about it - How long is a movie vs. how long is a sports match (on average)? Pretty similar. Sports streaming used to be, and still is to some extent, a highly complicated field with lots of weird rules only those who deal with it fully understand. So were movies, but thanks to the original content revolution Netflix started, things are getting much simpler. I expect to see that happening for sports just as well, which could mean more apps that stream them.
The same seven apps held the same seven download spots. Revenue told a different story, and a short-drama app from Singapore crashed the top 10.
MLB app downloads jumped 43% this February while revenue climbed to $3.5M, signaling a stronger season ahead for baseball on mobile.