More than 47 Million Impressions in June, up 63% over 2015

New Weekly MMA Podcast Launches this Week

In June and for the fourth consecutive month, ESPN Audio broke its record for the number of podcast impressions –47,555,864. That represents an increase of 63% over the previous June (29,223,213) and breaks the record set in May (41.2 million). Notably, the top 20 podcasts garnered more impressions than they did last June.

The three leading categories:

The three podcasts produced by the FiveThirtyEight team – Elections with 3M impressions, What’s The Point with 1.5 million, and Hot Takedown with 746,000.

The ESPN Radio Talk Lineup (The Dan LeBatard Show with Stugotz which led all offerings with 5.9 million, Mike & Mike with 4.1 million, Jalen & Jacoby with 2.5 million, Bomani Jones with 2.1 million, and Russillo & Kanell with 2.0 million).

A variety of NBA offerings: The Lowe Post with two million impressions, NBA Lockdown with 773,000, TrueHoop with 511,000, and NBA The Jump with 233,000).

The three most popular offerings outside of the above were PTI (3.6 million), First Take (3.3 million) and Baseball Tonight (1.4 million).

New Weekly MMA Podcast

This week, ESPN Audio is launching Five Rounds with Brett Okamoto, a weekly offering focusing on the MMA. Okamoto, ESPN.com’s MMA columnist, formerly covered the sport for the Las Vegas Sun. The debut episode with include interviews with MMA competitor CM Punk and John Kavanagh, Conor McGregor’s coach, as well as a preview of this weekend’s UFC 200.

“I’m super excited to be involved with this project, which adds an MMA-centric podcast to ESPN’s already outstanding portfolio of audio content,” said Okamoto. “My intent with this podcast is to bring fans closer to the sport and the people involved in it on a weekly basis.”

“We’ve been talking about an MMA podcast for some time now, and with a huge event like UFC 200 upon us it was time to stop talking and start doing,” said Pete Gianesini, ESPN senior director, radio programming and digital audio content. “We couldn’t be happier to have Brett bring his knowledge, perspective, and experience into the audio space via Five Rounds. We are excited to see where it goes from here.”

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