Reply to Gap between Caitlin Clark's WNBA salary and her male counterparts draws outrage

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Lost in all of this discussion is that the folks in charge of promoting the WNBA seem to go out of their way to do the opposite.

There was a story recently of players live-streaming a game on X that was not available on TV anywhere through any platform because the folks running WNBA TV assumed no one would watch (this in an era when I can livestream lower tier 14U AAU games played in rural PA).  The players’ streams both got up to like 1M views.   The next day, the league announced that preseason games would be on TV going forward.

The truth is that people will watch sports that are promoted and taken seriously by networks.  [b]See college softball - to me, not that compelling to watch, but it’s on TV constantly. [/b]

So far, with both NCAAW and WNBA, networks seem to go out of their way to devalue, hide, and denigrate the product.  I’m a middle aged dude and hardly a crusader for equity, but the business stupidity here makes my head explode.  WNBA salaries would be much higher if the league were marketed halfway intelligently.  [/quote]

I think the difference is that softball is different enough to baseball that people see it as independent from baseball.  A sports to itself.  While women's basketball gets viewed as the tag-along kid sister to men's basketball.

And tbh, I think you're doing a disservice to softball.  It may not be compelling to you, but we had HOURS of the regionals on in our house this weekend.  It's not due to marketing.  It's the fact that there's no alternative.  It's really only on for a few months of the year, and then not on again at ALL.  So you get about 2 months to watch softball on TV, that's it.  Meanwhile, we can watch women's basketball (and mens for that matter) 12 months of the year, and there's just not enough interest in it to support it year-round.

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