You always want a viewership story to sell if you are a professional sports league and the WNBA has a great metrics story to sell in 2024. Last week ESPN announced that its WNBA regular season was its most-watched ever for games across ESPN Networks airwaves (including ABC). Games averaged 1.2 million viewers, a massive jump over last year’s games (440,000 viewers). These are unheard of percentage increases in sports television.

Something even more impressive? The WNBA had 22 regular-season games that averaged more than 1 million viewers — the first time since 2008 that a WNBA game topped one million viewers. If you want to add in the WNBA All-Star Game and the WNBA Draft, it makes 24 programming events during the 2024 calendar year that topped 1 million viewers (Caitlin Clark was part of all but three of these windows, per Sports Media Watch).

On that note: The WNBA All-Star Game averaged 3.44 million viewers on ABC, crushing the previous audience record set in 2003. The WNBA Draft, featuring Clark, Angel Reese, Cameron Brink, averaged a record 2.446 million viewers, which is a 307 percent increase in viewership over last year.

What else? There were seven games on ION this season that topped more than 1 million viewers including last Friday’s game between Indiana and Las Vegas, which averaged 1.2 million viewers. Finally, Sports Media Watch reported that the Sept. 11 game between the Fever and Aces drew the largest WNBA audience ever on NBA TV at 678,000 viewers. The previous high was also set in 2024 with a Fever-Wings game on Labor Day weekend that drew 652,000.

The New York Times