The question of how important ESPN is to its parent company, The Walt Disney Company, comes up often. In January, the answer was “very important indeed.”
Nielsen’s just-released The Media Distributor Gauge report for January 2025 has Disney topping all competitors with 12.0% of total TV viewership (YouTube was second with 10.9%), and the College Football Playoff games in that month were a huge part of that.
Here’s more from Nielsen’s release on notable successes in the month for Disney, Fox, and Netflix:
Disney accounted for 12.0% of time spent watching TV in January 2025 according to Nielsen’s Media Distributor Gauge, locking in its best monthly share of TV among media companies since the report was established in November 2023. Disney’s success was primarily due to the College Football Playoffs, which represented the seven highest rated cable telecasts in January, and which drove an 84% monthly increase in ESPN viewership. Overall, viewing to Disney-owned entities was up 12% versus December to add 0.8 share points.
Further summarized in Nielsen’s January 2025 Gauge ‘Classic’ report, this month’s Media Distributor Gauge results were also influenced by a 5% monthly increase in TV watch-time. A busy news cycle helped drive a 26% monthly uptick in cable news viewing, including +26% for MSNBC, +29% for FOX News Channel and +39% for CNN. However, FOX News Channel ultimately provided the primary boost for FOX at the total distributor level, leading the way with its coverage of the presidential inauguration. Overall, FOX was up 12% in January and tied Disney for the largest monthly viewing increase among distributors, finishing with 7.6% of total TV (+0.5 pt.).
Netflix clinched its highest share of TV to date with 8.6% of overall viewing in January. The pure-play streamer followed an already robust December with an even stronger January as its watch-time climbed 7%. This was due in large part to Squid Game, which generated 9 billion viewing minutes as January’s top streaming title, in tandem with 11 other original series and movies that reached over 1 billion viewing minutes each.
The ESPN and CFP information here is perhaps especially interesting. While the two first-round games ESPN had (they sublicensed the other two to TNT Sports) aired on broadcast ABC as well, the four quarterfinals, two semifinals, and national title game all were exclusive to the cable channel (with alternate feeds on different other platforms and various streaming options, but not a broadcast TV option). Having premiere live content like that on cable only is part of maintaining ESPN’s industry-leading per-subscriber fee, but it does drop the total audience a bit. (This isn’t a change from previous years, as the 2023-24 playoff also was cable-only, but, notably, Disney got a huge CFP bump in January despite not using their biggest platform in ABC.)
It’s worthwhile that Disney’s CFP boost came in a year when the semifinal and national title game audiences both saw year-over-year declines. Some of that is about the format change, with the semifinals no longer on New Year’s Day (and some quarterfinals getting that day’s historic college football bump instead). That format change also meant they got to air six CFP games in January instead of three.
But even with all that, ESPN’s audience here was still massive, and a key part of Disney’s month-over-month growth. That’s significant, considering that December had some big things on ESPN too, including CFP games and NBA Christmas games. And while the CFP wasn’t the whole January story (ESPN and ABC also had a NFL wild-card game), it was a large part of what put ESPN on top here.
On the non-sports side, it’s significant to see Fox doing so well in this report, especially to see Fox News cited as a bigger deal here than Fox’s coverage of the January portion of the NFL playoffs. And it’s also notable to see Netflix lock up its highest share of TV to date the month after their exclusive Christmas Day NFL games (which drew their huge ratings, and helped them to their best viewership month since 2023), and to do so without live sports content in the month. However, Disney pulled off the overall monthly win from the distributor side, and ESPN, once cited by some as a problem for the wider company and something to spin off, was key to that victory.