Families across the United States celebrated Mother’s Day on May 14, and on devices around the world, the WNBA became the first professional women’s sports league to stream a game on Twitter.
That night, the Dallas Wings tipped off against the Phoenix Mercury in a live-streamed game that garnered the attention of 1.1 million unique viewers for those with the video at least 50 percent in view for two seconds or more. The game’s average minute audience was 62,459 —the number of people watching at an average minute of the broadcast.
That 1.1 million viewer figure is impressive by any standard, considering that the 10 Twitter live streams of Thursday Night Football in 2016 attracted 3.5 million individual viewers per game. But more than that, it provided WNBA president Lisa Borders an important bit of information.
“Metrics like Twitter tell us that there is a hunger for our game and women’s basketball in particular,” Borders told reporters last month at a press conference in Seattle for the 2017 WNBA All-Star Game. “This is a global game, as I mentioned earlier, played in more than 200 countries.”
Attesting to that global reach is the fact that of the 1.1 million people who streamed that first game, 60 percent lived outside of the United States, Borders said.
By the All-Star Game on July 22, the WNBA had played 10 games of its 20-game Twitter deal for this year; the deal extends to 2018 and 2019, with 20 games a season. The league has regularly averaged 800,000-plus viewers, and a third of the games played as of July 22 have broken the million-viewer threshold, Borders said.
“Everybody get the number right,” Borders said. “More than 1 million viewers.”
The WNBA’s deal with Twitter has provided the league, which also appears regularly on ESPN, with much greater possibilities for exposure. With the Twitter deal, the WNBA can reach a global audience that knows the WNBA brand because the league’s players often compete internationally in the offseason.
“Clearly we play our games during our season, our six-month season, from April until October in the U.S., but our players, many of them, are global citizens and play during the second six months of the year in the international markets,” Borders said. “So those markets are now able to follow our players on a consistent basis throughout the year on a platform like Twitter and can even broaden the reach of the W today.
“So we think it’s going to increase the number of eyeballs watching the WNBA, making them more aware of the league, of our players, and what an extraordinary sport that we play.”
Those eyeballs also skew younger, Border said, because Twitter is a tool used mainly by millennials and the youth market.
Of significance is the fact that the very first game on May 14 was at 6 p.m. Eastern, a time when surely many families were, enjoying Mother’s Day dinner. And the WNBA was still able to draw 1.1 million people, a sign that the league’s numbers could rise — and usher in an era of popularity for women’s sports as a whole.