The Caitlin Clark effect strikes again.
One of women’s basketball’s biggest names helped drive a 307 percent increase in viewership for Monday’s 2024 WNBA Draft at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, drawing a whopping 2.446 million viewers to ESPN’s coverage, according to Sportico.
The massive increase is due in large part to the hype around Clark being selected first overall by the Indiana Fever.
It marked the first time that the women’s league draft drew more than 1 million viewers and easily surpassed the viewership of both the MLB and NHL drafts in 2023, Sports Business Journal’s Austin Karp reported.
The previous WNBA draft viewership record had been set 20 years earlier when 601,000 viewers tuned in to see Diana Taurasi taken first by the Phoenix Mercury.
