WNBA Viewership Across All Networks Up 21% From Last Year, Even Without Caitlin Clark

The WNBA has a lot to celebrate heading into the back half of the 2025 season. Despite Caitlin Clark being sidelined with injuries, the league is seeing record-breaking growth in viewership.

According to Nielsen data obtained by Front Office Sports, the WNBA is averaging 794,000 viewers across 56 nationally televised games this season. That's a 21% increase from last year’s full-season average.

That’s significant for a couple of reasons. First, 2024 was already the most-watched season in league history. And second, Clark — the Indiana Fever superstar largely credited with bringing millions of new eyeballs to the sport — has missed 13 of Indiana’s 26 games this year because of injury.

Caitlin Clark has missed half of the Indiana Fever games so far in 2025.

(Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images)

So while Clark's team remains the league’s biggest draw, with Fever games averaging 1.26 million viewers, fans are tuning in even when she’s not on the court.

The most surprising jump? Non-Fever games are up 37% compared to last season. That shows that the WNBA’s new audience isn’t just following Clark, they’re also sticking around for the league as a whole. And with a massive $2.2-billion media rights deal kicking in next year, that’s exactly what the league needs to see.

WNBA Seeing Positive Numbers Across the Board

ESPN, CBS, Ion and NBA TV have all seen increases in WNBA viewership this season.

• ESPN (including ABC and ESPN2) is up 3% year-over-year.
• CBS is averaging 1.3 million viewers — up 5.5%.
• Ion is averaging nearly 600,000 — up 4%.
• NBA TV is up a whopping 58%, despite having the lowest average viewership overall.

So far, the most-watched game of the season was the opener between the Indiana Fever and Chicago Sky (fueled, of course, by the rivalry between Clark and Angel Reese), which pulled in 2.7 million viewers.

This year's All-Star Game, which Clark missed because of a groin injury, took a 36% dip from last year's historic viewership, but it still saw 52% higher viewership than any All-Star Game in the pre-Caitlin era.

WNBA ratings are up 21% over last season.

(Photo by Steph Chambers/Getty Images)

So there’s no question that Caitlin Clark jump-started a new era for women’s basketball. But the WNBA's current numbers show the league actually is more than a one-woman show.

And you can bet the Players' Association will come armed with these numbers for the next round of CBA negotiations.