“We’re means undervalued in the present day,” Cathy Engelbert, the commissioner of the W.N.B.A., instructed DealBook.
Stars have powered viewership peaks in ladies’s sports activities. In a 2018-19 survey by researchers at Ohio State College, solely 3 % of respondents mentioned ladies’s sports activities constituted all or virtually all of their sports activities consumption, and 10 % mentioned half or most of it. However viewers will present up in hordes, notably when these matches are being performed on a giant world stage.
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Serena Williams’s last match of the 2022 U.S. Open introduced in between 4.8 million and 6.9 million views, probably the most for a tennis match in ESPN’s historical past
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A file 6.43 million viewers tuned in to look at the ladies’s U.S. soccer crew, which included Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe, play within the World Cup final yr.
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Clark’s last school recreation, a loss within the N.C.A.A. championship recreation, drew 18.87 million viewers on ABC and ESPN, about 4 million greater than the boys’s championship recreation.
Alex Michael, a managing director on the funding financial institution LionTree, mentioned the worth of stars may be rising as media consumption continued to shift away from broadcast tv. “It’s not solely the stay video games, however simply their lives — whether or not it’s social media or different aspects of storytelling,” he mentioned.
The chicken-or-the-egg drawback. Whereas extra viewers translate to extra money for the league, it takes cash to seek out new viewers. In 2022, the W.N.B.A. raised $75 million from an investor group that features Nike, Condoleezza Rice, Laurene Powell Jobs and Michael Dell. The league can also be planning a number of enlargement groups that it hopes will herald extra money.
The 2022 funding has gone into advertising, advert campaigns, influencer advertising and stay occasions, Engelbert mentioned. And a few of these efforts could also be paying off: This previous season, the league averaged 627,000 viewers per recreation on ABC — nonetheless a fraction of the 1.09 million throughout all networks for N.B.A. video games, however its most-viewed common season in additional than a decade.
“The seeds have been sown during the last 5 years for this monumental progress,” Chiney Ogwumike, a bunch for ESPN who was the W.N.B.A.’s first total draft decide in 2014, instructed DealBook.
As proof of ESPN’s function in that progress, she cited pregame exhibits for the W.N.B.A. and an rising variety of exhibits about ladies’s school basketball.
