The current growth in ladies’s professional sports activities is, partly, attributable to the disintegration of legacy media corporations, from conventional tv to print newspapers and magazines, in keeping with NBA Commissioner Adam Silver.
“A lot of it has to do with the Internet,” Silver mentioned at Fortune’s World Discussion board in a joint interview with MLB commissioner Rob Manfred. “I think that we’ve disintermediated traditional gatekeepers.”
Earlier than the rise of the web, social media, and streaming platforms, all of which wanted infinite hours of content material, media corporations have been the final word determination makers on what could be dished out to audiences. Too usually that got here on the expense of girls’s sports activities, Silver mentioned.
Conventional media gatekeepers are now not “in a position to say ‘this is what’s going to be carried on our airwaves’, or ‘this is what’s going to be in our precious editorial pages,’” Silver mentioned.
Slightly, the nonstop quest for content material has meant customers can extra simply discover ladies’s sports activities which they beforehand weren’t in a position to do.
“Now it’s more expensive and consumers get to decide,” Silver mentioned.
That’s resulted in a brand new paradigm through which ladies’s sports activities are afforded the protection they beforehand lacked. All of this has led to a flourishing enterprise. The WNBA noticed a record-breaking season with the rise of star rookies Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. Even earlier than they went professional, Clark and Reese have been drawing unprecedented ranges of consideration. When the 2 confronted off within the ladies’s NCAA event in April, the sport carried a record-breaking 12.3 million viewers. This yr’s WNBA Finals between eventual champions the New York Liberty and the Minnesota Lynx additionally broke viewership data. Sport 3 of the sequence was the most-viewed WNBA Finals sport in 25 years.
Audiences “are demonstrating there’s genuine interest in women’s sports and the product,” Silver mentioned.
In July, the WNBA finalized an 11-year media rights cope with main broadcast companions Disney, Amazon Prime, and NBC for $200 million a season, in keeping with the AP. That quantity is greater than triple the $60 million a yr the WNBA receives underneath its present settlement. The caliber of media companions, a few of whom have been concerned with the league prior to now, was taken as a testomony to ladies’s sports activities’ function as marquee reside programming that broadcasters are desperate to safe for themselves. For instance Disney, underneath its ESPN model, has been carrying the league since its inception in 1997.
Silver, too, talked about the WNBA’s founding in that yr, as proof that whereas the mainstream pleasure could have damaged by way of not too long ago, ladies’s sports activities have been round for many years.
“As much as it seems like an overnight sensation, the WNBA just completed its 28th year,” Silver mentioned.
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