NYC Rebel
...on the otherside of the pond
The purpose of a business is to bring in profits.
Grantland might be done by 2016
- Thread starter Jmare007
- Start date
Exactly. Dude wanted to rage against the machine while making millions of dollars. He wanted to say anything that came to his mind without consequence like he owned the place. He didn't think about the people who worked for him, he was just caught up in trying to appear to be a rebel to his viewers. He wants his readers to think he's a guy showing up to the office with his hat on backwards when in reality he's just as pompous as his bosses at ESPN. It's fine to be an a$$hole when it's just your ass on the line, not when your entire staff is at stake.
If anything he was overpaid which Is evidenced by the lack attention and money Grantland brought in.
Absolut
Legal Bookie
Sure, but when you have to trim budget stuff like grant land is the first to go. Too niche
GoddamnyamanProf
Countdown to Armageddon
If all media was reduced to that short-sided mentality, film studios would never release anything but tentpole popcorn flicks and the only genre of music being made would be pop.
Grantland isnt a 'business'
It was designed to produce high level content for a company that was lacking it, if they thought it was going to be a super profitable division, then thats on the fault of ESPN
Grantland delivered on what it set out to do
NYC Rebel
...on the otherside of the pond
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
I dont even know what you're laughing at. I can give you countless examples of media/entertainment outlets that have divisions within their umbrella that are set out to produce high level content, not necessarily to generate high profits
Your wasting your time breh.
NYC Rebel
...on the otherside of the pond
But that's who the media appeals to.
Advertisers pay for page clicks.....and salacious headlines with short stories is what garners page clicks which in turn, gets media companies PAID.
MURICA'
Americans read headlines. And not much else.
LandryFieldsDad
All Star
wasnt grantland valued at 85 million?
NYC Rebel
...on the otherside of the pond
Especially when you've screwed up like this:
ESPN made 2 critical mistakes, and now it's paying the price
Last week, ESPN cut 300 employees.
Layoffs are always hard, but these seemed to be particularly painful for people at the company.
Charley Steiner, a former ESPN employee, said on Facebook: "This week, many of the men and women who provided the foundation, balance, direction and creativity to this iconic franchise were called into someone's office and occupationally and emotionally executed."
He said ESPN's cuts were "Not just fat. Not just muscle, but down to the bone."
Why did ESPN, still richly profitable, feel compelled to cut so many people?
John Ourand at Sports Business Journal has the best explanation.
He says it comes to down two big problems for ESPN.
ESPN is losing subscribers because of a critical mistake it made in 2012 when it was negotiating carriage deals with cable companies like Comcast, Cablevision, and Cox.
- ESPN is losing subscribers.
- ESPN is paying an obscene amount of money for sports.
According to Ourand, ESPN was negotiating for a $6-per-subscriber fee from the cable companies. To secure that high of a fee, ESPN had to be flexible on its "penetration benchmark levels," or the number of homes that cable companies guarantee ESPN will be in.
At the time, ESPN was guaranteed to be in 90% of cable subscribers' homes. To get $6 per subscriber, ESPN lowered that threshold to 80%.
When ESPN lowered the standard, it allowed cable companies to start introducing new cable packages that excluded ESPN. People are signing up for those cable packages, leading to ESPN's losing 8.5 million subscribers over the past four and half years, according to Ourand citing Nielsen estimates.
This falls in line with the numbers we collected recently. After three decades of growth, ESPN's place in the American home is slipping.
Business Insider
At the same time ESPN started losing subscribers, it started paying massive fees for sports.
Cork Gaines/Business Insider
ESPN is paying $1.9 billion annually to air "Monday Night Football," and other NFL content across its various platforms. That's $800 million more than the next closest competitor. Ourand says people are skeptical there was even another bidder within $500 million of that number.
After overpaying for the NFL, ESPN overpaid for the NBA, tripling its rate. It also doubled its rate for MLB rights.
A former employee said, "It’s been a total mismanagement of rights fees, starting with the NFL renewal ... We overpaid significantly when it did not need to be that way, and it set the template to overpay for MLB and the NBA."
That's why ESPN is cutting "to the bone."
