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Kirk Van Houten

Kirk Van Houten

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May 7, 2019
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Another game another record. Seems like as long as Clark is there this year we could the women's championship get better numbers than the men's championship.
 
Kirk Van Houten

Kirk Van Houten

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May 7, 2019
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www.sportsmediawatch.com

NC State-Duke hops to five-year high, 15 million, on Easter Sunday

The combination of Easter family gatherings and an underdog upset of Duke delivered one of the largest basketball audiences in recent years.
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Sunday’s NC State-Duke NCAA men’s basketball tournament regional final averaged a 6.4 rating and 15.14 million viewers on CBS, marking the most-watched Elite Eight game since Michigan State-Duke in 2019 (16.20M) and the most-watched basketball game of any kind, including the Final Four and NBA Finals, since the 2022 national championship (Kansas-North Carolina: 17.05M).

Since the wave of cancellations and postponements that decimated the industry four years ago, the Wolfpack’s win ranks fifth among basketball games behind the aforementioned 2022 title game, North Carolina-Duke in that year’s Final Four (17.66M), the 2021 national championship (Baylor-Gonzaga: 17.08M) and Gonzaga-UCLA in that year’s Final Four (15.39M).

Easter Sunday has become a high-viewing day in the out-of-home era, having previously boosted the NBA to its most-watched opening weekend playoff game since 2002 and the Masters to its largest final round audience since 2019. Prior to the out-of-home era, Easter was actually a drag on viewership.
 

Reaser

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May 19, 2021
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Kirk Van Houten said:
Dear god now it's hard not to think the final four games of the WBB will be bigger than the MBB
Click to expand...

Certainly a more realistic probability than the multiple people on X that were saying, and being serious about it, that the NCAAW National Championship game can/will get bigger viewership than the Super Bowl in 10-15 years.

The way people turn positives into absurdity, thinking they're championing women's sports but instead look idiotic.

Annoying as ignoring history. "No one watched before now! Women's basketball!" and I'm sitting there thinking I remember the early-to-mid 90s Women's National Championship games getting over 7.0M every other year, and the Cheryl Miller era doing big #'s (twice broke 11.0M,) and UConn-OU and UConn-Vols both getting over 5.5M on cable/ESPN in early/mid-00s. Only thing that changed is Clark and more games on TV but everyone acts like women's basketball is 'new' or has never been popular anywhere and act like the Final Four/Championship games were getting 100k average viewership the previous 40 years. It's ridiculous and makes the coverage of the success(es) annoying. Should be celebrating the increase, but not while ignoring that people have certainly watched women's college basketball before the last two years and that some big #'s were put up at various times. Which this rant made even more sense before Monday and the record viewership because that # had never happened before, but it all still applies, regardless.
 
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Kirk Van Houten

Kirk Van Houten

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May 7, 2019
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Reaser said:
Certainly a more realistic probability than the multiple people on X that were saying, and being serious about it, that the NCAAW National Championship game can/will get bigger viewership than the Super Bowl in 10-15 years.

The way people turn positives into absurdity, thinking they're championing women's sports but instead look idiotic.

Annoying as ignoring history. "No one watched before now! Women's basketball!" and I'm sitting there thinking I remember the early-to-mid 90s Women's National Championship games getting over 7.0M every other year, and the Cheryl Miller era doing big #'s (twice broke 11.0M,) and UConn-OU and UConn-Vols both getting over 5.5M on cable/ESPN in early/mid-00s. Only thing that changed is Clark and more games on TV but everyone acts like women's basketball is 'new' or has never been popular anywhere and act like the Final Four/Championship games were getting 100k average viewership the previous 40 years. It's ridiculous and makes the coverage of the success(es) annoying. Should be celebrating the increase, but not while ignoring that people have certainly watched women's college basketball before the last two years and that some big #'s were put up at various times. Which this rant made even more sense before Monday and the record viewership because that # had never happened before, but it all still applies, regardless.
Click to expand...
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The 10 most-watched NCAA women's basketball games

With Iowa and LSU in a rematch of their highly-viewed 2023 national championship, here are the ten most-watched women's tournament games on record.
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Yup what you're saying is listed here
 
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KevFu

KevFu

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May 22, 2009
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Phoenix from Rochester via New Orleans
The main thing is that this kind of "normalizes" people watching women's sports on TV.

It goes from "why is this on TV?" to just another choice. Just like how soccer was never on TV from like 1984-1993, so the next decade people hated on it, and then the decade after that, people who don't like soccer just don't bring up how much they hate soccer every time it's on TV.

The other key note about this that it signals a drastic need for a format change: You can clearly see that about 12-15m people are gonna watch "March Madness" in each of the non-workday windows, and just pick ONE OF the multiple games that are on. So by competing with each other for 3 of the 4 days in the weekend is dividing the audience.
 
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Reaser

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May 19, 2021
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Kirk Van Houten said:
Click to expand...


The 'other' games #'s are nothing to sneeze at but focusing on Clark factor, in the less-desirable time slot, doubled the viewership of the other game. Similar to the Elite 8, where UConn-USC benefit from Iowa-LSU lead-in but still lost nearly half the audience, with the peak in the late game (UConn-USC) coming in the first 15 minutes -- otherwise known as the leftover Iowa-LSU audience that hadn't switched the channel yet.

Saying the obvious here, but there's Clark (capital S, Star) and then there's the women's basketball increase(s) in viewership.
 
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Kirk Van Houten

Kirk Van Houten

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May 7, 2019
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Kirk Van Houten said:
I'm going to go 2/3M over the men championship


Oh and btw it's probably going to be closer to 19M
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South Carolina-Iowa women's final is top hoops game in five years

Sunday’s South Carolina-Iowa NCAA women’s basketball national championship averaged a 9.3 rating and 18.89 million viewers across ABC (8.6, 17.48M), ESPN (0.8, 1.39M) and ESPN Deportes (0.01, 15K), marking the largest basketball audience (college or pro, men or women) since the 2019 Virginia-Texas Tech men’s national championship on CBS (19.63M). The previous high over that span was 18.59 million for Game 6 of the 2019 Raptors-Warriors NBA Finals on ABC. (Keep in mind out-of-home viewing was not tracked in Nielsen final nationals until 2020.)

Viewership for the national title game has now increased in five consecutive years. In the first year of that streak, 2019, Baylor’s national title victory over Notre Dame averaged a mere 3.54 million.

The Gamecocks’ win, which peaked with 24 million viewers in the fast-nationals, delivered the largest non-football sports audience of any kind since the 2022 FIFA World Cup final on FOX and Univision (22.32M). Only that World Cup final and a post-Super Bowl Winter Olympics telecast earlier the same year (22.49M) rank higher dating back to 2019.
 
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