Media
AS, worldwide leader in sports news in Spanish
The Spanish-headquartered media giant continues its growth in Spain, the US and its other editions, consolidating its leadership in the Latin American market.
The year 2021 is seeing the start of a return to normality in professional sport. Vaccination programmes and the measures adopted by governments to control the spread of covid-19 have allowed fans back into the grounds across a number of sports, along with the holding of a number of major sporting events that were postponed in 2020: the Euros, Copa América and the Olympic Games in Tokyo. It is, nevertheless, still a complicated situation, but one in which PRISA Media’s sports brand continues to be the worldwide leader in coverage in Spanish, thanks to a solid performance across all of its editions.
In Spain, where the audience of Diario AS is no longer audited by Comscore, in line with the rest of the PRISA Media outlets and other media companies in Spain, AS.com has once again seen a major increase in its digital audience. According to internal data, in June the website saw the second best ever audience in its history, with an increase of 43% in unique users, 38% in page views and 40% in video plays compared to June 2020. The results of the first half of 2021 are also extremely positive with an average growth compared to the same period in 2020 of 24%, 40% and 8% respectively in each of the metrics.
Top 10 in the US
In May, AS USA registered more than 12 million unique users, being 10th in Comscore’s Sports category (domains only), and eighth most read media site. The category is dominated by three sites of major TV channels, ESPN (53.1M), CBS (40.5M) and NBC (27.7), while Spanish outlet Marca was in 26th place with 4.24 million. This is the sixth highest audience figure for AS in this market, with a growth of 168% compared to the April figure. AS has continued to grow its readership in the US, with a growth of 29% in the audience between January and May 2021 compared to the same period in the previous year, thanks to the performance of AS USA English and AS USA Latino (in Spanish), which is the number one sports website in the US, ahead of Marca, Bolavip (3.78M), Depor (1.27M) and TUDN (1.13M).
Clear leader in Latin America
AS has bolstered its leadership among sports outlets in Latin America, according to Comscore’s regional report (Latam excluding Brazil, PC data only). It was the leader in May for the 15th month in a row, with 7.29 million unique users, ahead of Marca (4.94M) and Fútbol Sites (2.4M). Depor.com (2M), ESPN (1.77M), Olé (1.76M), Mundo Deportivo (1.40M), TyC Sports (1.23M), Dazn Media (1.23M) and Sport (697,000) complete the top ten.
AS registered its best ever result in the region, growing 9% over April’s figure and with a year-on-year growth of 12%, increasing its lead over Marca to 2.09 million. The audience of AS in the first five months of 2021 grew 29% (compared to 8% for Marca) compared to the same period in 2020. Furthermore, AS heads up the list of sports outlets in Chile (a record 6.94M), Colombia (7.07M), Peru (998,000 PC only) and USA (sites in Spanish). It’s second in Mexico (8.64M) and Argentina (9.61M).
Note: The information in this article is based on internal data from AS and various different reports from Comscore for May 2021: Comscore MMX Multiplatform USA, Comscore MMX Latin America (excluding Brazil, PC data), Comscore MMX Multiplatform Chile, Comscore MMX Multiplatform Colombia, Comscore MMX Multiplatform Mexico, Comscore MMX Multiplatform Argentina and Comscore MMX Peru (PC data). The data in these rankings have different ranges and cannot be directly tallied. Regional rankings are based on PC data, while country rankings include data for mobile and PC.