Sabrina Ionescu #20 of the New York Liberty shoots the ball in the course of the recreation in opposition to the Minnesota Lynx on Might 18, 2021 a
Sabrina Ionescu #20 of the New York Liberty shoots the ball in the course of the recreation in opposition to the Minnesota Lynx on Might 18, 2021 at Barclays Heart in Brooklyn, New York.
Steven Freeman | Nationwide Basketball Affiliation | Getty Pictures
Sports activities betting agency PointsBet agreed to a partnership with the Girls’s Nationwide Basketball Affiliation. It is the primary cope with a ladies’s sports activities league for the corporate.
The licensing settlement, introduced Friday, permits PointsBet to make use of WNBA group logos and gamers’ pictures throughout its platforms to develop its model consciousness. The corporate desires to place itself for sports activities betting amongst ladies’s sports activities customers, and the WNBA says viewership is up.
Monetary phrases of the one-year settlement weren’t supplied.
In a press release, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert mentioned the cope with PointsBet will present a digital second-screen expertise. The deal offers WNBA customers a brand new technique to watch video games infused with PointsBet betting odds.
“Innovating on the WNBA and enhancing the fan expertise begins with recognizing how our followers wish to work together with the gamers, groups, and the league,” Engelbert mentioned.
The WNBA is celebrating its 25th anniversary this season and says it is seeing a bump in viewership. Turner Sports activities reported a 27% improve (81,000 viewers) for the Might 14 NBATV telecast, a season opener that includes New York Liberty star Sabrina Ionescu. That is in contrast with the Washington-Connecticut recreation final July, which averaged 64,000 viewers.
In October, ESPN mentioned the three-game WNBA Finals sequence that includes the Seattle Storm and Las Vegas Aces averaged 440,000 viewers, with Recreation three averaging 570,000 viewers. The community mentioned the ultimate recreation had a 34% improve in viewers over the 2019 WNBA Finals Recreation three contest.
PointsBet believes within the development potential in betting exercise round ladies’s sports activities. It measures the success of the 2021 ladies’s school basketball event as proof ladies’s sports activities can lure bettors. In April, ESPN mentioned the title recreation between Arizona and Stanford averaged roughly four million viewers and peaked at 5.9 million. The community mentioned it was the most-watched ladies’s contest since 2014.
“We’re thrilled to align with the WNBA and produce the world-class PointsBet expertise to probably the most digitally-engaged fan bases on earth,” mentioned PointsBet CEO Johnny Aitken. “The WNBA has accomplished an outstanding job with rising fan engagement, and PointsBet is worked up to be a bit of that puzzle shifting ahead.”
Based mostly in Australia with a U.S. headquarters in Denver, PointsBet can also be aligning for the way forward for in-game bets. In March, it acquired Banach Know-how — known as the Robinhood of sports activities playing. In-play wagering permits customers to make micro-bets throughout video games.