{"id":727149,"date":"2026-06-10T09:07:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T09:07:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/727149\/"},"modified":"2026-06-10T09:07:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T09:07:09","slug":"fever-still-running-hot-near-milestone-audience-for-clark-and-co-against-liberty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/727149\/","title":{"rendered":"Fever still running hot: Near-milestone audience for Clark and co. against Liberty"},"content":{"rendered":"

Three years in, Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever continue to generate milestone WNBA audiences.<\/p>\n

Saturday\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n

New York\u2019s win, which peaked with 3.02 million viewers, increased a third from Fever-Sky in the same primetime CBS window last year \u2014 a game Caitlin Clark missed due to injury (1.92M).<\/p>\n

Note that this is the first WNBA season since Nielsen shifted to its new methodology using \u201cBig Data\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

Most-watched WNBA games, past 25 years
\n\"A<\/a>Largest WNBA audience since 2001.<\/p>\n

Viewership nearly doubled the previous week\u2019s primetime CBS game, which also featured the Fever \u2014 albeit against the expansion Fire<\/a> (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\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Three years in, Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever continue to generate milestone WNBA audiences. Saturday\u2019s Fever-Liberty WNBA…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":727150,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[629],"tags":[49,48,95432,82,630,262318,95434],"class_list":["post-727149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-fever-tv-ratings","tag-sports","tag-wnba","tag-wnba-on-cbs","tag-wnba-ratings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/727149","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=727149"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/727149\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/727150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=727149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=727149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=727149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}