ESPN.com sucks on weekends
Has anyone noticed how much ESPN.com, especially their “MLB” page, sucks over the weekend? Maybe not, since the time when most people most obsessively check the internet is during the week, when they are at work and supposed to be doing other things.
But now that I am living in Japan, where due to timezone differences my weekend hardly overlaps with the US weekend, I really notice it. The front page hardly gets updated. Web gems don’t get posted at all. Don’t even think about new columns or blog posts. And breaking news stories and trades sometimes don’t get posted until as late as an hour or two after they are covered elsewhere.
All of which is in contrast to the workweek, when ESPN is pretty on top of things. Overall, the feeling is of a web enterprise that only has a couple people in the building on weekends.
In this day and age of the 24-hour news cycle, blogs, and viewers around the world, it really makes no sense for a website as prominent as ESPN.com to all but shut down over the weekend.
It’s cute and all when some sort of mega-news goes down over the weekend and a video gets posted wherein Buster Olney looks like he just got out of bed, but if a site like mlbtraderumors.com can afford to hire people to cover the weekends, ESPN should too.
June 28th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Nick, I think the difference is that MLBtraderumors pays something like $5 a post and is not (as far as I can tell) accountable to the IRS or any other regulatory body. For one thing, for ESPN to hire weekend workers they’d probably have to pay them time-and-a-half, at least on Sunday, assuming that CT has the same laws as we do in MA. Plus you can be pretty sure that their traffic nosedives on the weekends, when as you point out, no one in the US is sitting around their computer hitting “refresh.”
I guess I just don’t see a pressing demand (or need) for ESPN to give 110% on the weekends – when their audience probably watches the games on TV anyway.
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