Another weekend, another set of viewership milestones for the WNBA.
Sunday’s Fever-Dream WNBA regular season game averaged 2.58 million viewers on ESPN, marking the largest WNBA audience of any kind ever on cable. The previous high was 2.54 million for Fever-Sun Game 2 in the first round of the 2024 playoffs, Caitlin Clark’s most-recent playoff game.
Indiana’s win, which peaked with four million viewers in the 7:15 PM ET quarter-hour, was the eighth game this season to average at least 2.4 million viewers — doubling the previous 25 seasons combined. (Note that this is the first WNBA season since Nielsen shifted to its new “Big Data + Panel” methodology and the second since it expanded its out-of-home viewing sample to cover 100 percent of markets in the lower 48 states. It is likely that some games from the prior two seasons would have hit that mark under the same conditions.)
Overall, the 12-largest WNBA audiences since 2000 have occurred in the past three seasons, each involving Fever G Caitlin Clark — nine Fever games, her two appearances in the All-Star Game and the 2024 WNBA Draft in which she was selected first overall.
The strong lead-in provided a boost to the second game of ESPN’s doubleheader, a matchup of sub-.500 teams between the Mercury and Fire in which former Phoenix G Diana Taurasi had her jersey retired. That game averaged 1.35 million, marking the largest WNBA regular season audience ever on ESPN that did not involve the Clark-era Fever.
The ESPN family of networks (including ABC) were averaging 1.4 million viewers for WNBA games entering Tuesday’s doubleheader, up 16% from last year. With the WNBA soon to pause for a three-week break for the FIBA World Championships and the pro and college football seasons about to start, ESPN has only one more regular season night after Tuesday — and it is more than a month away on September 22.
ESPN was not the only network to set a record for a Fever game last week. Indiana’s previous game against Dallas averaged 1.62 million viewers on ION last Friday night, marking the largest WNBA audience ever on the network, which began airing games in 2023. Notably, the game was the most-watched sporting event of a day that included an NFL preseason game on NFL Network.
In addition to ranking as the most-watched WNBA game on ION, it was also the network’s top program of any kind in nearly four years — since August 30, 2022.
