ION's Most-Watched WNBA Preseason Game Ever Proves Scripps' Women's Sports Bet Is Already Paying Off
743,000 viewers tuned in to a preseason game on a Saturday in April.
The Indiana Fever and New York Liberty drew ION's most-watched Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) preseason game in the network's history on April 25, averaging 743,000 viewers and peaking at 822,000. Year-over-year, that's 76% growth against ION's first preseason game in 2025 and 129% growth against the second.
When Scripps Sports Network (SSN) launched on March 24 as the first dedicated women's sports channel in free ad-supported streaming (FAST), the conventional read was that it was a programming milestone. We saw it as a capital formation move — that Scripps was claiming real estate while FAST inventory was still priced as remnant, building a two-tier distribution system before the market caught up to what the audience was already doing.
743,000 tuning in before the regular season starts is not a viewership story. It's a pricing signal. ION carries 50 WNBA games this season — more than any single network. If the preseason ceiling is 822,000, media buyers pricing the opening night slate on May 8 are working off a floor that didn't exist twelve months ago.
Three more preseason games air before tip-off. Dallas Wings vs. Indiana Fever on April 30. New York Liberty vs. Connecticut Sun and Las Vegas Aces vs. Dallas Wings on May 3. Each one is another data point for the rate card.
This is the same distribution thesis we tracked when Scripps took the Professional Women's Hockey League (PWHL) from 56 million homes to 126 million in four months. The same infrastructure logic we broke down when Magnite automated SSN's live sports inventory across six leagues and ten platforms. The thesis was never about viewership growth. It was about what viewership growth becomes when it has a distribution infrastructure built to capture it. That infrastructure is now live, it's measured, and it's compounding.
The preseason just became the proof point.
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