Obsidian Potency 3.0
Why ESPN has jumped the shark.
posted Friday, 8 December 2006
Over the past 10 years, ESPN has gone from a cheeky, sports-obsessed enclave to an industry giant to a bloated, self-absorbed corporate division of Disney that threatens to collapse under its own product's sucktitude.
How does ESPN suck, you ask? Simple. Over the years, somewhere along the line, some higher powers in the company decided that they needed to be more than several sports channels. Somewhere along the line, they decided they had to be not just a bastion of sports, but a purveyor of pop culture. That's when they shit the bed.
The evidence is all around us. In the past, a trip to ESPN.com was a trip to a sports paradise. Article after column talked about sports, and sports alone. Insiders gave you trends and tips with very few clicks. Pages were clearly laid out and easy to read. It was a virtual trip I always looked forward to.
Fast-forward to today's ESPN.com - a pillar of their product, and one of the most viewed sites on the internet. There is a massive ad that needs to be clicked through. The front page has dozens of links to different areas of ESPN even before you reach any content. On the right, there is "ESPN Motion", a shitty, waste-of-space viewer that plays AUTOMATICALLY when you load the site. If I wanted to watch clips designed to be watched on TV, I'd turn on my TV.
Even without Motion, the regular page takes about 5 minutes to load onto my mobile browser. ESPN.com is an example of what happens when decisoins are made by marketers and idea people without the healthy influence of web developers and technical experts with veto power. The site doubles as a high-end sports portal and a mammoth monument to wasted bandwidth.
Underneath is a "Spotlight" section, which has a scrolling series of highlighted articles. It would be nice if I could just click on each one, if it wouldn't automatically scroll. Alas. Today, there is an "E-Ticket" article: "Did Ali Invent Rap?" Do I care? It's an interesting premise, but not one that I want to see on the front page of ESPN.com.
Most of the content on ESPN used to be free. Now, there are more ads than ever - and more pay areas than ever. Columns that used to be free are now pay. Memberships have become more expensive. Some columnists' archives can't even be read without a paid membership. Charging for archives? Who do they think they are, a newspaper? ESPN is a sports site. They can't get away with that shit. Then there are the E-Ticket specials. These are presented almost without fail in a format that makes them more difficult to read than the average article. I'm drowning in layout design here!
Wait -- let me rephrase my comment from the previous paragraph: ESPN is supposed to be a sports site, and a sports network. Instead, it's devolved into a self-congratulatory, masturbatory, self-referential morass of lame pop culture references and carefully-calculated, artificial controversy. The fingerprints of this malady are everywhere; every TV personality tries to stand out by being Kenny Mayne or Stuart Scott. And the biggest personalities (Scott, Berman) have become caricatures of themselves. It seems that most of them spend more time 'being themselves' than they do actually calling and analyzing sports events. This affliction has even reached the PTI crew. Some episodes are almost devoid of actual analysis; instead, Tony and Mike jab at each other using inside jokes that few of us even get. Only over the past couple of weeks have they started to do their jobs again -- I was worried we were going to lose them.
If I wanted constant referendums on pop culture outside of sports, I would watch different shows on different channels and visit other sites. That's why the ill-fated Page 3 died - people just don't care about the pop crap unless it was clearly and significantly connected to the sports they watched.
So until ESPN starts remembering where they came from, I have removed their link from my sports links section. And I'm visting TheSportingNews.com and SportsIllustrated.com more and more these days. I hope that at some point, sanity will again reign and ESPN will go back to what made them popular in the first place.
How does ESPN suck, you ask? Simple. Over the years, somewhere along the line, some higher powers in the company decided that they needed to be more than several sports channels. Somewhere along the line, they decided they had to be not just a bastion of sports, but a purveyor of pop culture. That's when they shit the bed.
The evidence is all around us. In the past, a trip to ESPN.com was a trip to a sports paradise. Article after column talked about sports, and sports alone. Insiders gave you trends and tips with very few clicks. Pages were clearly laid out and easy to read. It was a virtual trip I always looked forward to.
Fast-forward to today's ESPN.com - a pillar of their product, and one of the most viewed sites on the internet. There is a massive ad that needs to be clicked through. The front page has dozens of links to different areas of ESPN even before you reach any content. On the right, there is "ESPN Motion", a shitty, waste-of-space viewer that plays AUTOMATICALLY when you load the site. If I wanted to watch clips designed to be watched on TV, I'd turn on my TV.
Even without Motion, the regular page takes about 5 minutes to load onto my mobile browser. ESPN.com is an example of what happens when decisoins are made by marketers and idea people without the healthy influence of web developers and technical experts with veto power. The site doubles as a high-end sports portal and a mammoth monument to wasted bandwidth.
Underneath is a "Spotlight" section, which has a scrolling series of highlighted articles. It would be nice if I could just click on each one, if it wouldn't automatically scroll. Alas. Today, there is an "E-Ticket" article: "Did Ali Invent Rap?" Do I care? It's an interesting premise, but not one that I want to see on the front page of ESPN.com.
Most of the content on ESPN used to be free. Now, there are more ads than ever - and more pay areas than ever. Columns that used to be free are now pay. Memberships have become more expensive. Some columnists' archives can't even be read without a paid membership. Charging for archives? Who do they think they are, a newspaper? ESPN is a sports site. They can't get away with that shit. Then there are the E-Ticket specials. These are presented almost without fail in a format that makes them more difficult to read than the average article. I'm drowning in layout design here!
Wait -- let me rephrase my comment from the previous paragraph: ESPN is supposed to be a sports site, and a sports network. Instead, it's devolved into a self-congratulatory, masturbatory, self-referential morass of lame pop culture references and carefully-calculated, artificial controversy. The fingerprints of this malady are everywhere; every TV personality tries to stand out by being Kenny Mayne or Stuart Scott. And the biggest personalities (Scott, Berman) have become caricatures of themselves. It seems that most of them spend more time 'being themselves' than they do actually calling and analyzing sports events. This affliction has even reached the PTI crew. Some episodes are almost devoid of actual analysis; instead, Tony and Mike jab at each other using inside jokes that few of us even get. Only over the past couple of weeks have they started to do their jobs again -- I was worried we were going to lose them.
If I wanted constant referendums on pop culture outside of sports, I would watch different shows on different channels and visit other sites. That's why the ill-fated Page 3 died - people just don't care about the pop crap unless it was clearly and significantly connected to the sports they watched.
So until ESPN starts remembering where they came from, I have removed their link from my sports links section. And I'm visting TheSportingNews.com and SportsIllustrated.com more and more these days. I hope that at some point, sanity will again reign and ESPN will go back to what made them popular in the first place.
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