It Looks Like the NBA Very Much Lowballed the WNBA's Media Rights!
Yes, It Looks Like Cheryl Miller Was Right!
Last summer the NBA negotiated a new media deal for both the NBA and the WNBA.
As Lyndsey D’Arcangelo reported at Awful Announcing at the time:
The Athletic recently reported that the (WNBA) is set to receive around $2.2 billion over the course of the next 11 years. That’s an average of $200 million dollars per year with room for additional revenue growth by adding additional media partners. The deal was secured during the NBA’s negotiations with Disney, NBA and Amazon Prime, totaling $75 billion in contracts.
It is important to emphasize – as I said last summer – that the market didn’t decide the NBA’s media rights were worth $72.8 billion and the WNBA rights were only worth $2.2 billion. These numbers were decided by the NBA. And that means, according to the NBA, the media rights for the men are 33 times more valuable than the same rights for the WNBA.
These numbers are not supposed to reflect the value of the WNBA and NBA in the past. This is what these two leagues are supposed to be worth going forward.
So, what do these leagues look like going forward? Let’s start with the latest numbers. According to ESPN, in 2024 the ESPN broadcasts of the WNBA regular season averaged 1.2 million viewers per game while the WNBA Finals averaged 1.6 million viewers per game. And we should note, game five of the WNBA Finals peaked at 3.3 million viewers. As the WNBA noted: “This was the most-viewed regular season ever across ESPN platforms…”
In sum, it appears ratings for the WNBA are exploding!
Just a few days after the WNBA Finals ended, the NBA regular season began. NBA fans have been without the league for months. One would expect an immense amount of anticipation from the fans who have not been able to see NBA basketball for so long. Right?
Well, not exactly.
According to Awful Announcing, ESPN only averaged 1.6 million viewers on its opening night. This means the NBA’s opening night only had 400,000 more viewers per game than the WNBA’s average broadcast on ESPN this past season.
The results on opening night for the NBA are quite close to what the league saw for its broadcasts during the 2023-24 regular season. According to Statista, across all broadcast channels the NBA averaged 1.56 million viewers per regular season game in 2023-24. Statista also notes that these results are quite similar to what the NBA has seen across the past five seasons. In sum, the NBA’s regular season ratings seem to be stagnating.
Once again, the NBA decided on its own that its media rights should be worth 33 times the value of the media rights for the WNBA. But NBA ratings don’t appear to be growing at all while the television audience for the WNBA on ESPN has never been bigger.
All of this happened before the media deal even started. The NBA arbitrarily decided the NBA was immensely more valuable than the WNBA. And then the 2024 ratings data appeared and suddenly it seems the NBA was very, very wrong.
Cheryl Miller seems to have called this when the deal was announced last summer.
"I'm not great with numbers, low-ball (offer). That's a low-ball. You're saying how much? Not enough. Not even close. Now, I'm not trying to inflate it a whole lot — ($2 billion) is nice, ($8 billion) would be better.
So, is Cheryl Miller right? Should the WNBA be getting $8 billion over 11 seasons; or $727 million per year? Bloomberg reported that WNBA revenue was $200 million in 2023. If Miller is right, WNBA revenue the first year of this deal should be more than $800 million per year. And that would also mean the NBA is transferring billions of WNBA media dollars to itself.
That is quite a claim.
Okay, let’s delve a bit deeper into the numbers. According to the WNBA, across all platforms (not just ESPN), WNBA regular season games averaged about 1 million viewers per broadcast. Again, the NBA’s regular season broadcasts averaged 1.56 million viewers per game across all platforms. That suggests the NBA is not 33 times more popular than the WNBA.
The playoff, though, are a bit different. The WNBA playoffs – before the finals – were similar to the regular season. On average, about 970,000 people tuned in for each playoff game before the finals. The finals were clearly more popular. The broadcasts of the five WNBA finals averaged 1.538 million viewers (and again, the final game peaked at 3.3 million).
Playoff basketball in the NBA is even more popular. The broadcasts of the NBA playoffs in 2023-24 averaged 4.53 million viewers. In addition – relative to the WNBA – the NBA’s playoffs have many more games.
That is the same story for the regular season. If all the NBA playoff series went to seven games, the NBA’s playoffs would have 105 games. Next year the finals for the WNBA will be seven games long. But even with that addition, the WNBA’s postseason is limited to 29 games (again, if all series go as far as they can go).
It is the same story in the regular season. The NBA has 30 teams playing 82 games. So, the NBA has 1,230 regular season games that can be broadcasted. The WNBA has expanded. But even after expansion, the league will only have 15 teams playing a 44 games season. So, the WNBA only has 330 regular season games.
Of course, the differences in schedule length – and the number of teams -- are a result of decisions the NBA has made. As we state in Slaying the Trolls, on paper the NBA shares ownership of the WNBA with the twelve team owners. Of course, as Suzanne Abair – the CEO of the Atlanta Dream – said:
“If the 12 WNBA owners say they want to do something and the NBA says no, the answer is no.”
So, the reason why the WNBA has fewer games and fewer teams is because the NBA has decided that’s that way it should be. Obviously, there is no reason why the WNBA players couldn’t also play 82 games in the regular season and also have four rounds of playoff games.
But the value of the media rights is not about what could be. The rights are determined by the number of games that are going to be broadcasted. And right now, there are potentially 1,335 regular season and playoff games in the NBA and only 359 potential games in the WNBA.
Given the number of games in each league and the aforementioned ratings in the regular season and playoffs, there could be 2.4 billion viewers of NBA games each year (if the playoffs went the distance all the time). In contrast, the WNBA – again, given their 2024 ratings – would only have 362 million potential viewers.
All of this assumes all games are broadcasted (which they are not!) and ratings do not change. That latter assumption seems reasonable for the NBA (again, ratings have stagnated for the NBA). But I think we have to believe that WNBA ratings will grow substantially across the life of this deal.
Nevertheless, let’s just go with the number of viewers we have calculated with data from this past season. Given those numbers, the NBA has 87% of all potential professional basketball viewers. Therefore, we might be able to argue they should get $65.15 billion from the new media deal. And that means the WNBA should be receiving $9.85 billion.
In sum, Cheryl Miller might have been right! At least, her estimate and my estimate aren’t very different.
Of course, these are just estimates. The NBA estimated the WNBA’s media rights are only worth $2.2 billion. Cheryl Miller and I estimate this value is billions higher. And if we are right, then the WNBA should be getting close to $900 million per year from its media rights. Or to put it another way, each team should be collecting – just from the national broadcasting deal – close to $60 million per year.
Yes, that would mean the players, coaches, and owners in the WNBA would all be doing quite a bit better than they are now.
This is not just about media rights. If the WNBA media rights are worth $8-$10 billion, then the story the NBA has told about WNBA profits is very different.
The NBA has claimed the WNBA lost $40 million this season. And in the past, the NBA claimed league losses were $10 million per year. I have stated repeatedly that I doubt these stories (and we devote an entire chapter in Slaying the Trolls debunking the NBA’s profit story). But even if the NBA’s story were true, it appears going forward the NBA is taking far more from the WNBA. Right now, the NBA has arbitrarily decided to give $200 million per year to the WNBA for its media rights. According to the above calculations, that number should be closer to $900 million.
This means, the NBA – going forward – is taking $700 million PER YEAR from the WNBA. If you add up all the losses the NBA claims it has suffered across the WNBA’s entire existence, you do not get anything close to $700 million. Going forward – if the arguments Cheryl Miller and I independently offer are at all accurate -- the NBA is going to be extracting more than the value of all these imagined losses.
Every. Single. Year.
Let me close by repeating what I said back in July. If the NBA is choosing the WNBA’s revenue numbers, then they can’t claim the WNBA is losing money. So, it is time for the NBA to stop talking about the WNBA’s profitability.
And maybe it is also time they really start to rethink how they are splitting that massive new media contract!