AdGrowthWeekly | Issue No. 55

Women’s sports are having another big year on both sides of the business. U.S. audiences watched 28.3 billion minutes in the first half of 2026, an 18% increase from a year earlier, after viewing reached a record 46 billion minutes in 2025. The audience is broadening too, with Nielsen estimating 122.5 million Americans, or 52.8% of the population, now have an interest in women’s sports. Advertisers are spending more to reach those viewers, with category ad spend up 120% since 2022, while the amount of women’s sports programming tracked by Nielsen expanded from just 621 telecasts in 2023 to 3,363 in 2025. Sponsorship values have grown as well, increasing 82% for the NWSL, 71% for the WNBA and 51% for the LPGA, putting some hard numbers behind how much the audience, media coverage and advertising business around women’s sports have expanded.

Streaming subscriptions are not getting cheaper, but the annual jumps are becoming less aggressive. Ampere Analysis found that the average price increase across Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon dropped from 24% in 2023/24 to 14% in 2025/26, while the average dollar increase eased from $1.67 to $1.54. Ad-free subscribers continue to see the larger increases, averaging $1.62 per hike compared with $1.21 for ad-supported plans, helping widen the average price gap between the two options from $4.53 to $5.35. Netflix shows that split clearly in the U.S., where the difference between its Standard with Ads and Standard plans grew from $8.50 in 2023 to $11 by July 2026. Disney+ recorded the sharpest slowdown, with its average percentage increase falling from 31% in 2023/24 to 13% in 2025/26, while Amazon made the fewest pricing changes among the three services over the three years.

Sunday nights are becoming a bigger part of the NWSL schedule, with Roku securing an expanded package of exclusive national matches beginning this weekend. The Roku Sports Channel will stream eight NWSL matches starting August 30, 2026, before the package grows to 25 Sunday night games in 2027. Every match will be available free with no subscription required through The Roku Channel, which can be accessed beyond Roku devices on Fire TV, Samsung TVs, Google TV and mobile. Roku says its platform reaches more than half of U.S. streaming households, while its Sports Zones saw streaming hours climb 122% and unique visitors increase 80% year over year during Q2. The agreement expands a relationship that already includes the NWSL Zone launched in 2025, adding a recurring Sunday night window to the league’s national media schedule.

TV ratings are getting another round of updates just before the new fall season begins. Starting August 31, Nielsen will introduce seven enhancements to its Big Data + Panel currency methodology, including a new approach to co-viewing that incorporates wearable devices worn by panelists to passively detect audio from TV shows, movies, and live events. Other changes include updated household estimates that replace older 2024 survey inputs with more recent viewing behavior, adjustments to how ACR smart TV data is measured, improvements to the machine learning model used to assign household demographics, and new weighting between panel and big data sources. Nielsen is also updating its Hispanic measurement methodology by combining data from the U.S. Census American Community Survey and the National Hispanic Enumeration Survey to estimate Spanish language audiences. The changes arrive as Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel system already incorporates viewing data from 45 million households and 75 million devices, alongside a person's panel of more than 100,000 people across 42,000 U.S. homes.