A dramatic winner-take-all game between two of the league\u2019s highest-profile teams delivered one of the top WNBA playoff audiences since 1999.<\/p>\n
Tuesday\u2019s Fever-Aces WNBA semifinal Game 5 averaged 1.83 million viewers on ESPN2, trailing only Caitlin Clark\u2019s two playoff games last year (2.54M and 1.84M) as the most-watched WNBA playoff game outside of the Finals since 1999.<\/p>\n
The Aces\u2019 overtime win, which peaked with 2.1 million viewers, ranks fourth among all playoff games \u2014 including the Finals \u2014 since 2000, behind the two Clark games and Game 5 of last year\u2019s Finals (Lynx-Liberty: 2.15M).<\/p>\n
For the season, Game 5 ranks sixth in viewership behind five other Fever games, four of which featured Clark. Overall, the Fever have played in the nine most-watched WNBA games this season, and that does not include the WNBA All-Star Game, which the franchise hosted in Indianapolis. (Keep in mind that the majority of regular season viewership figures are panel-only, rather than the \u201cBig Data + Panel\u201d figures that became Nielsen currency in September.)<\/p>\n
Seven-figure WNBA audiences have become such a frequent occurrence that they are no longer notable. But recall that prior to the start of last season, no WNBA game of any kind had averaged one million viewers since 2008.<\/p>\n
The full WNBA semifinals averaged 1.3 million viewers, up 57% from last year. While Nielsen\u2019s February expansion of out-of-home viewing and September rollout of \u201cBig Data + Panel\u201d mean that this year\u2019s numbers have a built-in advantage over prior seasons, that would not fully account for an increase of such size.<\/p>\n
The big gains for the semifinals helped counter a double-digit decline for the opening round. Entering the Finals, WNBA playoff games averaged 1.1 million viewers \u2014 up 15% from a year ago. Again, keep in mind that these are \u201cBig Data + Panel\u201d figures being compared to last year\u2019s panel-only viewership.<\/p>\n
The postseason average figures to benefit further from the newly expanded WNBA Finals. While average viewership figures to take a hit from the absence of New York, series length is often a bigger viewership driver than matchup quality \u2014 and the Mercury-Aces series will not have to go the distance in order to be the longest in league history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A dramatic winner-take-all game between two of the league\u2019s highest-profile teams delivered one of the top WNBA playoff…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":190985,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[629],"tags":[49,48,95432,82,630,95433,95434],"class_list":{"0":"post-190984","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wnba","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-fever-tv-ratings","11":"tag-sports","12":"tag-wnba","13":"tag-wnba-on-espn-abc","14":"tag-wnba-ratings"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190984\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/190985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}