ESPN announced that its United States podcast audience in July numbered 5.8 million. The metric marked a 17% increase on-year, and was the seventh consecutive month of year-over-year growth for the company. Within that July increase, ESPN’s dedicated podcast content saw a 25% increase in downloads.
ESPN’s Dave Nagle noted that FiveThirtyEight: Politics, The Lowe Post, and The Woj Pod helped drive the growth. The launch of the Le Batard and Friends podcast network earlier this year also helped bolster the audio performance for ESPN.
The sports network has been a regular fixture on the top publisher chart from Podtrac. It placed seventh on the July 2019 ranking, with more than 41.7 million global unique streams and downloads across its 62 shows.