Clay Travis at Outkick has penned a lengthy, detailed dissertation about ESPN’s dwindling audience base. Last year, ESPN lost some eight million subscribers, a 10 percent decrease. In addition to losing cable subscribers via cord-cutting, the hoped-for counterbalance via subscribers to the ESPN+ streaming service has yet to materialize:

First, ESPN’s existing cable contracts don’t allow them to move their top programming — the college football playoff, Monday Night Football, and the NBA playoffs for instance — off cable and on to streaming.

Last week ESPN released their ESPN+ subscriber numbers so far through the second quarter of 2022. And those numbers while growing, are a pittance, just 22.3 million subscribers currently have ESPN+.