The Women's Sports Audience Worth US$256B—and Why Brands Missed It
ION's WNBA bet drove 23.37M viewers and 700bp margin gains. Women's sports is now a US$256B market—and early movers lock exclusivity.
ION Television was a procedural drama network. Not a bad one, just an unremarkable one. Think reruns of Law & Order and CSI on a loop while the rest of the broadcast landscape modernized around it.
That changed when Keisha Taylor Starr took over as EVP, CMO, and General Manager of Scripps Networks, the division running ION. Within 24 months, ION became Google TV's most-watched free live channel in 2024. The move that got it there was a deliberate bet on women's sports before everyone else showed up.
The Bet Nobody Else Was Making
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When E.W. Scripps acquired ION in 2021 for US$2.65 billion, the network needed a reason to exist. Starr's answer was franchise-level investment in two things nobody was programming seriously at the time: WNBA basketball on Friday nights and NWSL soccer on Saturday nights.
This wasn't a soft commitment. ION launched the WNBA's first-ever national prime-time weekly studio show. It created structural programming slots, not filler content. The thesis was simple: sports fans, especially women, had no reliable place to find these games. ION would be that place before anyone else figured out it was worth being.
The numbers validated the bet faster than most expected.
What the Results Actually Look Like
WNBA viewership on ION more than doubled from 2023 to 2024, going from 12.3 million unique viewers to 23.37 million. Seven games averaged over one million viewers. The August 30, 2024 Indiana Fever vs. Chicago Sky doubleheader peaked at 1.92 million, setting a new WNBA ratings record on the network.
The audience composition surprised even the skeptics. Half of ION's 18-49 WNBA viewers were women. But the male 25-54 demographic grew 181% year-over-year. Women's sports programming, it turned out, was not a niche product for one audience. It was a broad audience that nobody had assembled in one place yet.
Scripps Networks' margins followed. In 2025, the division delivered a nearly 700-basis-point year-over-year margin improvement, attributed directly to the women's sports strategy and streaming revenue growth.
What Follows a First-Mover Win
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By March 2026, Scripps moved from a network play to a platform play. It launched the Scripps Sports Network, a 24/7 free streaming channel broadcasting over 100 live games per year across Google TV Freeplay, Roku, Samsung TV+, and other platforms. State Farm signed on as the foundational advertising partner, a brand that secured category exclusivity in women's sports prime time before the space got crowded.
The media rights market moved in parallel. The NWSL's 2024 deal with ESPN, CBS, Prime Video, and Scripps was worth US$240 million over four years, up from US$1.5 million per year previously. The WNBA followed with an 11-year, US$2.2 billion deal with Disney, Amazon, and NBCUniversal.
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What APAC Media Executives Should Take From This
The ION case is not a US story. The global women's sports market is on track to reach US$256 billion by 2030, growing at 8.5% annually. Women's sport sponsorship is growing 50% faster than men's major leagues. Asia Pacific has its own underserved audiences in women's cricket, W-League football, and women's esports.
What ION proved is that the window for early-mover advantage closes. State Farm got exclusivity because it moved before the market priced in what women's sports audiences were worth. The rights deals that followed locked in that value for others.
The question for APAC executives advising clients on sports content investment is the same one Starr answered in 2022: which audience is real, underserved, and available before anyone else commits?
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