It isn't as bad as I thought it would be and as far as the league is concerned this is a good thing. The playoff viewership dropped by more than half but this was expected because the games that didn't have Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever in it already had rather lackluster numbers in comparison. The last game that the Indiana Fever played in vs. the Connecticut Sun, there were a recorded 2.5 million live viewers in the United States and probably quite a lot of international views as well. The latest WNBA playoff games have all gotten less than 1 million viewers with one of the games barely breaking 600,000.
This isn't as terrible as it seems though because these figures are both better than any of the playoff games of 2023. Back then, when nobody even remembered that the WNBA had a league, they struggled to get 300,000 viewers and the stadiums were not even sold out.... for a playoff final.
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When the WNBA first game into being there was a huge push to get people to watch and it took a few years but people lost interest almost completely but thanks to what is being called the "Clark Effect" this year set all the records in terms of viewership and public interest in the league. Although the pundits are running around in circles trying to attribute this to anything else they can think of, everyone knows that this meteoric rise is exclusively because of Caitlin Clark.
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Even if you don't like women's sports... and it would be completely understandable to me if you don't... you really should check out Caitlin Clark highlights at the minimum. This woman is a generational talent that is simply unparalleled. This is a bold statement that I am about to make but she is, compared to everyone else in the league, more of a standout than even Michael Jordan was for the NBA. Obviously any NBA team would absolutely destroy any WNBA team but that isn't the point. The point is that compared to the other people in the WNBA, Caitlin Clark simply plays in a way that is redefining excellence. There is just something about her court vision that nobody has ever been able to do in women's basketball ever. She is a playmaker with her own shooting but isn't greedy either. She is working towards getting the points, not for her own glory.
She has in this season gotten some of the most spectacular assists that I have seen in basketball, men or women and she does it so regularly that it is just mind-blowing. She is also an absolute menace as far as shooting is concerned from anywhere on the court.
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She makes it look effortless too and that is probably what infuriates her opponents so much. She does what nobody else can do and does it with an effortless grace... she also isn't a braggart at all and is extremely humble and spends hours tending to the fans signing loads of autographs.
This is what drew people to watch her and her team in the first place and this is why the top 15 most-watched games of the WNBA season were all Indiana Fever games. In reality all of the Fever games were the most watched but for some stupid reason the stat makers pad the statistics to include people or bars that still had the channel on for games that played immediately AFTER Fever games and the viewers almost certainly didn't watch the entire game, they just hadn't changed the channel yet.
With them departing the playoffs early, a significant drop-off in viewership was expected and that is exactly what happened. ESPN moved the games from their main channel to ESPN-1 because they knew it would be in far less demand....and they were correct.
The doom and gloom isn't really all that bad though because the games that don't have Clark in them are still being watched by more people ever outside of the first couple of seasons. Refer back to the first chart to have a look at the near 20 year slump where basically nobody even cared that the games were on. For them to be pulling in nearly a million viewers domestically for games that Caitlin isn't playing in shows that the interest in the sport isn't entirely Caitlin-centric. There are fans of the other teams now that were likely created by all the hype surrounding Clark and this is great news for the league who has failed to be profitable in their over 20 years of existence.
Even though I hate the attitude of most of the players in the league, I would like for them to succeed to some degree and this increase in viewers is seriously indicating that maybe people are getting interested in the sport even if Indiana and Caitlin aren't playing. Personally, I don't watch any of the games but I do look at the box scores afterwards and this is much more attention than I ever paid to it in the past.
Sounds like the sport has grown it's audience by more than 100% and without Clark those numbers will still rise but at a slower rate. I have watched some female sports over the last year and even though the standards have risen I am not a regular viewer.
There was talk about how the viewership was rising but honestly, when they had already achieved rock bottom about 5 years ago an increase is almost guaranteed. There are some that like to point out that in order for the WNBA to achieve the levels of popularity they achieved in 1 year with Caitlin Clark, it would have taken 10-15 years for it to have happened organically given the increase year-by-year that was happening prior to her arrival.
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