Three years in, Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever continue to generate milestone WNBA audiences.
Saturday’s Fever-Liberty WNBA regular season game averaged 2.56 million viewers on CBS, officially marking the third-largest WNBA audience of any kind since 2000, behind Sky-Fever on ABC the opening weekend of last season (2.70M) and the 2024 WNBA All-Star Game, also on ABC (3.44M).
New York’s win, which peaked with 3.02 million viewers, increased a third from Fever-Sky in the same primetime CBS window last year — a game Caitlin Clark missed due to injury (1.92M).
Note that this is the first WNBA season since Nielsen shifted to its new methodology using “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes in conjunction with its traditional panel, and the second since the company expanded its out-of-home viewing sample to cover 100 percent of markets in the lower 48 states. It is likely that a number of games from the past two seasons would have ranked higher under the same conditions.
Each of the 11 largest WNBA audiences in the past 25 years has involved Caitlin Clark in some way, including the aforementioned 2024 All-Star Game, nine Fever games, and the 2024 WNBA Draft in which she was picked first overall. Two have come this season, with Fever-Liberty joined by Wings-Fever on ABC the opening weekend of the season (2.49M).
Most-watched WNBA games, past 25 years
Viewership nearly doubled the previous week’s primetime CBS game, which also featured the Fever — albeit against the expansion Fire (1.295M). Beyond the vastly different drawing power of the Fire and Liberty, a big factor in the stronger audience this past weekend was considerably lighter competition. The prior week’s game aired opposite Game 7 of the NBA Western Conference Finals on NBC (15.90M), while Fever-Liberty faced less formidable opposition from Game 3 of the NHL Stanley Cup Final on ABC (5.05M).
The game faced even less competition than anticipated, as the Red Sox-Yankees Major League Baseball game on FOX was rained out. Red Sox-Yankees was to air in a window leading directly out of The Belmont Stakes, a pairing that last year resulted in the largest MLB audience of the regular season.
