Facing its toughest competition yet, the WNBA Finals viewership held up about as well as one could expect Monday night.<\/p>\n
Monday\u2019s Dream-Valkyries WNBA Finals Game 5 averaged 1.4 million viewers, combining a Nielsen-estimated linear audience on USA Network and CNBC with a Peacock streaming audience measured by Adobe Analytics \u2014 down from the previous Game 5 two years ago, a winner-take-all Lynx-Liberty game on ESPN under the old best-of-five format (2.15M).<\/p>\n
Golden State\u2019s win topped all other Game 5s in WNBA Finals history, all of which were winner-take-all games. Prior to 2024, the high-water mark for a Game 5 was 913,000 for Sparks-Lynx in 2017, with none of the others scratching the 700,000 mark.<\/p>\n
(Historical comparisons come with the usual caveats regarding changes in Nielsen methodology \u2014 its inclusion of out-of-home viewing, shift to \u201cBig Data + Panel\u201d and now enhanced tracking of co-viewing \u2014 but viewership is so much higher than in almost all past years that methodology is less likely to play a meaningful role than in other sports.)<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s Finals is the second since the event expanded to a best-of-seven format. The first best-of-seven series, last year\u2019s Aces-Mercury, ended in a four-game sweep.<\/p>\n
Game 5 averaged the second-smallest audience of the series, ahead of only Game 2 the previous week (1.3M). Not coincidentally, those are also the two games that aired opposite the NFL. Game 5 outperformed Game 2 despite facing considerably tougher competition, including a stronger-performing \u201cMonday Night Football\u201d game \u2014 18.8 million for Cowboys-Eagles, versus 17.9 million for the previous week\u2019s 49ers-Commanders \u2014 plus the World Series (8.3M) and NBA regular season. Game 2 faced only the NFL.<\/p>\n
Both Games 2 and 5 outperformed last year\u2019s lone Finals game to air opposite the NFL, Mercury-Aces Game 2 in a Sunday afternoon ABC window (1.2M).<\/p>\n
Two other games were originally set to air opposite the NFL \u2014 specifically \u201cThursday Night Football\u201d \u2014 but were rescheduled in order to ensure the Dream could play in Atlanta\u2019s State Farm Arena. Game 3 was shifted from a Thursday to a Wednesday, averaging 1.7 million viewers. Game 6 this past Thursday was shifted from primetime to a 12:30 PM ET start, with figures for that game not available until Monday at the earliest.<\/p>\n
While the WNBA has been competing with the NFL for years, Monday marked the first time that a WNBA Finals game has ever aired opposite the World Series. It may also be the last, as under the new collective bargaining agreement, the season could end nearly a month later than under the current schedule \u2014 as late as November 21 (November 30 in Summer Olympics years). That would mean the Finals would typically begin after the World Series has concluded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Facing its toughest competition yet, the WNBA Finals viewership held up about as well as one could expect…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":900816,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[99,434,377283,118980,105715],"class_list":["post-900815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-sports","tag-wnba","tag-wnba-finals-ratings","tag-wnba-on-usa","tag-wnba-ratings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900815","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=900815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900815\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/900816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=900815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=900815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=900815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}