Ratings for this year’s NCAA Women’s Volleyball Championship semi-finals and finals were way up from last year, ESPN’s Holly Rowe reports.
Rowe Tweeted out that overnight ratings for the semi-final games were up 50% from last year, and that the live streaming audience was up a whopping 183%.
This year, the semi-finals were upgraded from ESPN2 to ESPN, where they drew in 545,000 viewers (Texas vs. Nebraska) and 495,000 viewers (Stanford vs. Minnesota), respectively, according to sportstvratings.com.
Those games come in a tough time slot, matched up against the NFL’s Thursday Night Football, but still pulled in roughly the same number of viewers as the episode that immediately proceeded the early Stanford/Minnesota game, and the episode that followed the late game Texas/Nebraska. Popular ESPN afternoon talk shows Around the Horn and Sports Nation are also similarly-rated.
The Championship game, which was on ESPN2 on Saturday, December 19th from 9:03-11:30 PM Eastern Time, pulled in 576,000 viewers. That made it the 4th-highest rated show on ESPN2 on Saturday, behind only an NCAA Division II college football game, and two high-profile NCAA Division I basketball games (Davidson/Kansas, Notre Dame/Purdue).
For comparison, the college football bowl game between Southern Mississippi and Louisiana-Lafayette that matched up against it on ESPN drew 1,335,000 viewers.
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