TV Ratings: Women Top Men For Viewers

The NCAA women’s basketball tournament final Sunday drew more viewers than the men’s final for the first time in history, fueled in part by Iowa standout Caitlin Clark’s rise to superstardom and marking a stunning moment for the sport.

The Wall Street Journal reports Sunday’s women’s final attracted 18.9 million viewers, according to Nielsen, almost four times what the women’s final drew just two years ago. The last basketball game to be watched by more people was the 2019 NCAA men’s final between Virginia and Texas Tech, which drew 19.6 million viewers. 

Monday’s NCAA men’s final between Connecticut and Purdue was watched by 14.8 million. Because the women’s final aired on ABC—a broadcast network, which like ESPN is owned by Disney—it was available to a bigger pool of potential viewers than the men’s game, which was on Warner Bros. Discovery’s TBS and required a cable-TV-like subscription. (Cable TV has lost more than a quarter of its subscribers over the past decade.) On the other hand, the men’s final was played in prime time Monday, while the women’s game aired on Sunday afternoon.

Valuing media-rights deals is challenging—it’s hard to know when there will be a sudden surge in interest like the one women’s college basketball is enjoying. And while the final rounds of a tournament are important, sustained viewership interest over dozens of earlier games can drive prices up. The men’s entire tournament averaged 9.9 million viewers per game, far surpassing the women’s, which attracted an average of 2.2 million viewers, according to data from Warner Bros. Discovery and ESPN.

When the NCAA signed an eight-year, $115 million-a-year deal with ESPN that will give the women’s basketball tournament a 10-fold rights increase starting next season, it happened just as Clark was becoming a national sensation, setting all sorts of scoring and viewership records.

“I’m sure that they thought they were getting fair value at the time,” John Skipper, the chief executive of Meadowlark Media and former president of ESPN, said of the deal that the league reached with the network in January.