“We’re approach undervalued right this moment,” Cathy Engelbert, the commissioner of the W.N.B.A., advised DealBook.
Stars have powered viewership peaks in girls’s sports activities. In a 2018-19 survey by researchers at Ohio State College, solely 3 p.c of respondents mentioned girls’s sports activities constituted all or nearly all of their sports activities consumption, and 10 p.c 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.
Serena Williams’s remaining match of the 2022 U.S. Open introduced in between 4.8 million and 6.9 million views, essentially the most for a tennis match in ESPN’s historical past
A report 6.43 million viewers tuned in to observe the ladies’s U.S. soccer group, which included Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe, play within the World Cup final yr.
Clark’s remaining faculty sport, a loss within the N.C.A.A. championship sport, drew 18.87 million viewers on ABC and ESPN, about 4 million greater than the boys’s championship sport.
Alex Michael, a managing director on the funding financial institution LionTree, mentioned the worth of stars may be growing 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 downside. Whereas extra viewers translate to extra money for the league, it takes cash to search 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 be planning a number of enlargement groups that it hopes will usher in extra money.
The 2022 funding has gone into advertising and marketing, advert campaigns, influencer advertising and marketing 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 sport 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 had 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, advised DealBook.
As proof of ESPN’s position in that progress, she cited pregame reveals for the W.N.B.A. and an growing variety of reveals about girls’s faculty basketball.
