{"id":208529,"date":"2025-10-08T07:25:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-08T07:25:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/208529\/"},"modified":"2025-10-08T07:25:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T07:25:09","slug":"wnba-finals-opener-is-most-watched-since-leagues-inaugural-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/208529\/","title":{"rendered":"WNBA Finals opener is most-watched since league’s inaugural year"},"content":{"rendered":"

For all the tumult off the court<\/a>, the WNBA audience keeps growing in ways that would have been hard to fathom just three years ago.<\/p>\n

Friday\u2019s Mercury-Aces WNBA Finals Game 1 averaged 1.9 million viewers on ESPN, up 62% from Lynx-Liberty last year (1.1M) and the most-watched Finals opener since the inaugural edition in 1997, a single-elimination Liberty-Comets game that averaged 2.8 million on NBC.<\/p>\n

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 such a large increase.<\/p>\n

The Aces\u2019 win, which peaked with 2.5 million viewers, delivered the second-largest Finals audience overall since 2000 \u2014 behind only last year\u2019s winner-take-all Game 5 (2.2M) \u2014 and ranks seventh all-time. Four of the top ten have come in the past two years, with Games 3 and 4 of last year\u2019s series also making the list.<\/p>\n

There are few properties in all of sports that have seen as sharp an increase in viewership over the past ten years as the WNBA Finals. Game 1 of the 2019 Sun-Mystics WNBA Finals averaged just 238,000 on ESPN. When Aces-Storm opened with 351,000 in the 2020 \u201cbubble,\u201d that constituted a 48 percent increase and three-year high.<\/p>\n

WNBA Finals Game 1 viewership, past decade<\/p>\n

\"WNBA<\/a><\/p>\n

That 2019 Sun-Mystics finals was the most-recent to open with a year-over-year decline, failing to meet the bar of 246,000 set by Mystics-Storm the prior year \u2014 a game that aired mostly on ESPNews. In each year since, Game 1 of the Finals has increased double-digits over the prior year, rising the aforementioned 48% in 2020, 33% in 2021 (to 469K), 18% in 2022 (to 555,000), 31% in 2023 (to 729K), 56% in 2024 (to 1.1M) and finally 62% this year.<\/p>\n

Again, Nielsen\u2019s methodological changes play a role \u2014 2019 was also the final year before Nielsen began including out-of-home viewing in its estimates \u2014 but those are not going to fully explain increases of such size.<\/p>\n

Overall, the increase in viewership from Game 1 in 2019 to Game 1 in 2025 is nearly 700 percent.<\/p>\n

WNBA playoff games are now averaging 1.2 million viewers, up 16% from last year, with the caveats regarding Nielsen methodological changes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For all the tumult off the court, the WNBA audience keeps growing in ways that would have been…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":208530,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[99,434,38265,115806,105715],"class_list":["post-208529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-sports","tag-wnba","tag-wnba-finals","tag-wnba-on-espn-abc","tag-wnba-ratings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208529\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/208530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}