Nielsen’s numbers for the first half of 2026 are not close. According to its report, covered by Reuters and Sports Video Group, U.S. viewing of women’s sports reached 28.6 billion minutes from January through June, up 18 percent over the same stretch of 2025. Female viewership growth from 2024 to 2026 was led by the NBA, up 55 percent, and the NHL, up 44 percent. Advertising spend on women’s sports is up 120 percent since 2022, and sponsor valuations are up 71 percent for the WNBA, 82 percent for the NWSL and 51 percent for the LPGA. Of an estimated 16 million new sports fans, 9 million are women. The NCAA softball championship alone reached 30.7 million unique viewers on ESPN, up 54 percent year over year.
Sponsor Valuation Growth in Women’s Leagues
The Coverage Side of the Ledger
Now put the other half of the picture beside it. The most widely cited attempt to measure how much coverage women’s sports receive came from Wasserman’s research team, with support from ESPN Research, in a report released October 30, 2023. It covered 2018 to 2023 and found that women’s sports made up an average of 15 percent of total sports media coverage across linear TV, streaming, social and digital news. Streaming averaged 26 percent, and 18 percent of posts from the social accounts studied in 2022 were about women’s sports.
Women’s Sports Share of Sports Coverage
That 15 percent is a real improvement on older research. Awful Announcing, covering the release, noted a baseline of about 5 percent in earlier work by Cheryl Cooky and Michael Messner, who found women’s sports got 5.4 percent of TV sports show coverage in 2019, though the Wasserman analysis differs in method from that research and the two cannot be compared directly. What it is not is current. The newest comprehensive U.S. measurement of coverage share that we could find ends in 2023. The audience data arrives twice a year. The coverage data is almost three years old and is a single average across four kinds of media.
The Gap Worth Noticing
That is the gap worth noticing, and it is a measurement gap before it is a fairness argument. If coverage has grown as fast as viewership, nobody has published the proof. If it has not, the same is true. Either way, desks are deciding how much to give a growing audience while the best available number describes a market that has already moved.
The fairness argument lets outlets nod along and move on. The measurement argument is harder to wave off. Every other part of the sports business tracks audience growth in public, quarter by quarter. Coverage decisions, which determine what that audience gets to watch and read, are still made largely by feel. A study repeated every year would settle whether coverage caught up, and it would put the answer in front of an editor before the next budget meeting.
VDG Sports, where Vince Douglas Gregory writes about the business and culture of sports, will keep an eye out for the coverage number that finally catches up with the audience one.
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Vince Douglas Gregory is the ‘petulant puppet master’ of a sports media landscape addicted to scripted rage and performance art. As the architect of VDG Sports, he bypasses the corporate talking heads to expose the unfiltered truth behind the narratives.
An unstable thinker and astute scholar, Vince thrives on dismantling the mediocre click-bait addicts who trade reality for engagement. If you want boring stats, go elsewhere. If you want the raw reality of the game, you’re in the right place. Consider yourself warned.
