The WNBA is having a big year. Founded 28 years ago, the Women’s National Basketball Association is seeing a level of popularity it hasn’t since the late 1990s. Viewership, attendance, and advertisers have all increased during the 2024 season games, largely thanks to star rookie players Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese.
According to our analyses of March Madness 2023 and 2024, Clark and Reese were, respectively, the first and second most mentioned players across digital sources during the women’s NCAA championships in those years. They’ve gone on to sustain that popularity from their college years into their professional ones while racking up dozens of endorsement deals with high-profile brands like Reebok, Wilson, Reese’s, Gatorade, and more.
To learn more about the WNBA’s growth over the years, we dove into the news coverage numbers. Here’s what the data says about the popularity of U.S. professional women’s basketball.
Note: Data for 2024 includes mentions from January 1 to October 1, 2024. Data from previous years includes mentions from January 1 to December 31.
News coverage of the WNBA is on the rise.
Our analysis found that news mentions of the WNBA in 2024 so far are at least at a 15-year high.
Zooming in on the past few years, news mentions of the league nearly doubled from 2021 to 2022 before decreasing by 7% in 2023. However, mentions have surged in 2024 and will continue to as this season reaches the finals later this month.
News coverage of the WNBA is much more positive than negative.
Along with the volume of mentions, the sentiment of those mentions has also improved. This year 37% of news mentions are positive, up from 33.6% in 2023 and 20.7% in 2022. Some positive news articles with the furthest reach covered Team USA’s gold medal win in women’s basketball at the 2024 Olympics in Paris. The team included a record 31 athletes from the WNBA.
Caitlin Clark gets more news mentions than any other WNBA player.
Caitlin Clark, point guard for the Indiana Fever, is not only mentioned more than any other player, but is also mentioned more than top keywords like “points” and “game”. Her rival Angel Reese, power forward for the Chicago Sky, is the second most mentioned player, while Breanna Stewart, power forward for the Seattle Storm, is third.
The WNBA still has less news coverage than the NBA.
The NBA has long gotten much more attention than the WNBA, and 2024 isn’t much different overall. From January 1 to October 1, the men’s league was mentioned about 472% more than the women’s league. However, in August, that gap started to narrow as the WNBA regular season wound down. Finally, on September 21, just before the first round of the playoffs, the WNBA got more news mentions than the NBA for the first and only time this year. Though, once the WNBA season ends on October 20 and the NBA one begins soon after, mentions of the men’s league should take off again.
Overall, the WNBA has gained much more prominence over the past several years, as proven by the rise in news coverage. The success of the 2024 season has created hundreds of thousands of new fans and generated a demand for news about the league and players that may continue into future seasons. The Olympics undoubtedly brought more attention to the WNBA this year, but star players like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese may be able to drive that popularity further even without the Games. Time will tell if the league can continue this momentum, but no matter what happens 2024 will go down in basketball history as a major turning point in news coverage for the WNBA.
News mention trends are important for understanding the wider conversations and narratives surrounding specific topics, franchises, and brands. For the WNBA, the significant increase in news mentions in everything from sports to lifestyle publications shows how the league’s popularity has broadened beyond core basketball audiences. Use historical news data and analytics to learn more about how sports audiences are changing — see how in our industry snapshot report.
