WNBA All-Star Brand Partners Don't Undervalue the League's Growing Game
Brands showed up for WNBA All-Star weekend just as fans and broadcasters gravitated to a league that’s increasingly made of superstars.
The WNBA and ESPN have been looking forward to this All-Star Weekend since the broadcaster’s NCAA women’s March Madness coverage more than doubled its viewing audience this year from 2022 and ended with nearly 19 million viewers for its championship game. ESPN’s WNBA Draft coverage drew an audience four times larger than the previous record, while regular-season matchups saw their highest viewership in more than two decades—averaging 1.2 million viewers per game and increasing viewership by 177% from last year.
WNBA broadcast partner CBS has aired games nearing or exceeding 2 million viewers, while ION has had three WNBA matchups with audiences of 1 million or more. This all happened as rookie All-Stars Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese set WNBA records for assists in a single game (Clark with 19) and consecutive double-doubles (Reese with 15) and the star-studded Las Vegas Aces and New York Liberty rosters face serious challenges from Connecticut, Seattle, Minnesota and Phoenix.
Just before the All-Star festivities, the media world discovered that the WNBA’s portion of the NBA’s new $76 billion rights deal with Disney, Amazon and NBC came out to roughly $2.2 billion—or roughly six times the value of the W’s current deal with ESPN. Even that figure—which puts the WNBA’s annual take of $200 million a year over 11 years close to the total $240 million value of the NWSL’s then-record-setting women’s soccer broadcast deal from November—seems low to the WNBA’s union and other observers.
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