Audience Data Behind The Caitlin Clark Effect
Iowa women’s basketball phenom Caitlin Clark is seemingly everywhere as the star player attracts interest, no matter the screen.
For Monday night’s Elite 8 game vs. LSU, iSpot data shows an impressive TV rating performance to match Clark’s monumental 41-point outing. The contest had an average-minute P2+ in-home audience of 10.61 million on ESPN, plus another 3.77 viewers out-of-home on the night.
For reference, last year's women’s national championship game — also between Iowa and LSU — had an average-minute audience of 11.41 million P2+ viewers in-home. And Iowa’s 2023 Elite 8 win over Louisville, which also featured Clark, had an average-minute audience of 2.82 million viewers in-home on ESPN.
On top of the impressive average figure for the game, tune-in actually increased significantly as the game went on, from over 5 million P2+ viewers in the immediate pre-game to well over 12.5 million near game's end as Iowa and Clark pulled away from LSU to seal the win.
The chart below showcases how the game continued to pick up audience throughout, tacking on plenty of new viewers over the final quarter or so.
And Clark is a star on social video, too.
According to data from Tubular Labs, videos about Caitlin Clark generated 92.2 million YouTube views from Nov. 1, 2023 through April 1, 2024. That fervor has also only grown over time:
87.5 million of those views have come in the last 90 days, and 73.8 million have been since Feb. 15.
Publications have been a driving force for the rising views and interest in Clark, with ESPN, Fox Sports and NBC Sports all posting over 90 videos about Clark since the start of November 2023.
Since Feb. 15, over 100 YouTube videos per day have been uploaded about Clark.
The audience for Clark-focused videos supports the idea that women’s basketball audiences are actually a broad group. On YouTube, 85% of those that watched videos about Clark since Nov. 1 were men. In general, audiences for videos about Clark have a significant overlap with “mainstream” sports coverage. While popular women’s basketball social video account Women Hooping has a 23% audience overlap with Clark, accounts like Bleacher Report (68%), NBA on ESPN (40%), CBS Sports (38%) show even higher overlap and speak to her crossover appeal.
Clark also stacks up favorably vs. her male college basketball counterparts in terms of who’s driving the most video interest:
Since Nov. 1, videos about Purdue standout Zach Edey have 10.2 million views.
The same goes for the other men up for the Naismith Award honoring the sport’s best players. Videos about North Carolina’s R.J. Davis (5.7 million), Tennessee’s Dalton Knecht (3.4 million) and Houston’s Jamal Shead (638K) equaled just a fraction of her total.
In general, the best women’s basketball players are finding large audiences from a social video perspective: Videos about LSU’s Angel Reese generated 33.9 million YouTube views, USC’s JuJu Watkins had 5.0 million and UConn’s Paige Bueckers had 3.8 million. So while Clark is obviously the biggest star, she’s also the face of the sport’s wider rise in public consciousness and audience tune-in.
