Putting that into context, this is $48 million in revenue that ESPN has lost forever. (That's $8 a month x 500,000 lost subscribers x 12 months in a year).

The loss in subscribers puts ESPN down to just north of 86 million, which is a precipitous decline from the 100 million subscribers the network had as recently as the end of 2011. -Outlook the Coverage

OtC's Clay Travis says that part of the trend may be attributed to the fact that come tax season, penny pinching cable and satellite subscribers cut back, or "whether the end of the NFL, college football, and college basketball causes many sports fans to tune out for the summer."

While the numbers of lost subscribers haven't been as bad in the past few months, I suspect that's because ESPN threw such a fit over last year's numbers that Nielsen slowed down its subscriber attrition data for several months to make sure they weren't off in their data measurements. -Outlook the Coverage