Meta: Women's Sports a $3 Billion Opportunity for Brands

Meta has released a new report showing a marked recent rise in engagement with women's sports content across its apps — a shift that could open up valuable opportunities for brands. The company describes women's sports as "a $3 billion industry growing 4.5 times faster than men's sports," with that growth accelerating simultaneously across leagues, sports and markets.

In a video presentation, Nicola Mendelsohn, Meta's head of global business group, shared the following figures: the top 10 female athletes on Instagram have a combined following of 128 million people; Facebook hosts more than 20,000 groups dedicated to women's sports; and over the past quarter, WNBA content generated more than 1.2 billion views across Meta's platforms, while women's soccer content drew more than 900 million.

Judy Toland, Meta's vice president of global audiences, noted that a growing share of sports fans now prefer to follow the action through social media, where they engage with sports content most of the time. Every month, 445 million sports fans interact with brands on Meta's platforms.

According to Nicole von Kaenel, Meta's director of global partnerships, 68% of sports fans say they are willing to try a product used by their favorite athlete, and 76% confirm that athlete-created content has directly influenced their purchasing decisions.

Meta points out that in most sports categories, brand positioning was locked in long ago: partnerships are already in place, associations already formed, and new entrants are left competing on price alone for diminishing returns. Women's sports is one of the few categories where that ground is still up for grabs — brands entering now aren't joining an existing hierarchy, they're building it.

That's why Meta is urging brands to partner with female athletes and tap into a market that hasn't yet been fully unlocked — a rare opportunity in sports marketing that is still taking shape.