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   DealBook: Can the W.N.B.A. profit?
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             April 20, 2024
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          Good morning. We’re digging into the business of the W.N.B.A.; covering a big debate about “open source” A.I.; and looking at a new book about Amazon’s business tactics. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you?
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            <img alt="Caitlin Clark and Cathy Engelbert, both smiling, hold up an Indiana Fever basketball jersey with the number 1 on it." class="css-1ytstr3" height="400" src="https://inboxflows.com/_/image/https%253A%252F%252Fstatic01.nyt.com%252Fimages%252F2024%252F04%252F20%252Fbusiness%252F20DB-WNBA%252F20DB-WNBA-jumbo.jpg/?inbox_flows_img_sig=eyJwYXRoIjoiaHR0cHMlM0ElMkYlMkZzdGF0aWMwMS5ueSIsInRpbWUiOjE3MTM2MTQ0NDkuMzA3ODAxNX0:1ry9Oj:dF7WlRGHuVlUDBtsfKc95kANPrtEd0UDVRY-GSOO-yc" style="width:100%;height:auto;display:block;padding-top:10px;padding-bottom:8px" width="600"/>
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             Caitlin Clark, left, with the W.N.B.A.’s commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, after being drafted No. 1 overall by the Indiana Fever on Monday.
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             Brad Penner/USA TODAY Sports
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        <h2 class="css-12n1aic" style="color:#000;font:700 25px/32px arial,sans-serif;margin:0 0 10px">
         <span>
          Can the W.N.B.A. make money?
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        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
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          After the Indiana Fever made Caitlin Clark the W.N.B.A.’s No. 1 draft pick this week, the team’s ticket prices soared. The basketball star’s long-distance shots and huge following have landed her on “Saturday Night Live,” attracted
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          interest from sponsors like Nike
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          and
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          sold out jerseys
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          at a rapid pace.
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        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
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          In exchange for Clark’s once-in-a-generation talent, the W.N.B.A. will pay her … $76,535.
         </span>
        </p>
        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
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          News of the paltry first-year salary has ignited a countrywide debate that even
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          President Biden weighed in
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          on, commenting that “even if you’re the best, women are not paid their fair share.”
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          It also highlighted a hard truth that largely goes unspoken about the W.N.B.A. and many women’s sports leagues: They aren’t profitable.
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        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
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          The simplest reason the W.N.B.A. isn’t paying Clark more is that the league brings in just $200 million annually and relies on the N.B.A. for some of its funding. The N.B.A., by contrast, brings in about $10 billion.
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          When the N.B.A. and its commissioner at the time, David Stern, founded the W.N.B.A. in 1996, return on their investment wasn’t their immediate focus. As Stern
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          later recounted
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          , he wanted “to develop new fans, more programming, have arena content outside the N.B.A. season, give more girls an incentive to play basketball.”
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          And, he added, “we knew it was going to be a long haul.”
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        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
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          Indeed, many argue that the W.N.B.A. simply needs more time: The N.B.A. had a 50-year head start, and stars like Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan helped lift it up in the 1980s and ’90s.
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              A MESSAGE FROM WORKHUMAN
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               People who strongly agree that they get the right amount of recognition are 30% less likely to experience burnout than those who don’t. But what’s the “right amount”? The truth is, it varies. For example, 24% of male employees agree that they receive the right amount of recognition versus 11% of female employees. This points to a crucial difference between equity and equality in the workplace. Learn how social recognition can lead to a more equitable work environment.
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          The question now is whether Caitlin Clark is the W.N.B.A.’s own Larry Bird or Magic Johnson, a huge star coming at exactly the right time to raise interest across the sport. Or is she more like the league’s Tiger Woods: a talent whose popularity as a prodigy
         </span>
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          has yet to be replicated
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          ?
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        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
         <span style="font-weight:700;font-family:arial,sans-serif;color:#000">
          The W.N.B.A.’s profitability hinges on media rights.
         </span>
         <span>
          The league’s $60 million annual deal is up for renewal in 2025, and several trends are working in its favor, including a race among streamers to collect rights to live sports and a rise in legalized gambling that leaves
         </span>
         <a class="css-sdwaa1" style="color:#286ed0;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline">
          bettors eager to expand their outlets
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          .
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        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
         <span>
          College stars like Clark, Cameron Brink, Angel Reese, Alissa Pili and Aaliyah Edwards, who are joining the W.N.B.A. in
         </span>
         <a class="css-sdwaa1" style="color:#286ed0;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline">
          fashionable style
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          , bring an additional jolt to the league. Their collective drawing power during the N.C.A.A. tournament helped deliver a television audience for the women’s championship game that topped viewership for the men’s final for the first time.
         </span>
        </p>
        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
         <span>
          “We’re way undervalued today,” Cathy Engelbert, the commissioner of the W.N.B.A., told DealBook.
         </span>
        </p>
        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
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          Stars have powered viewership peaks in women’s sports.
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          In a 2018-19
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         <a class="css-sdwaa1" style="color:#286ed0;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline">
          survey
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          by researchers at Ohio State University, only 3 percent of respondents said women’s sports constituted all or almost all of their sports consumption, and 10 percent said half or most of it. But viewers
         </span>
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          will
         </span>
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          show up in hordes, particularly when those matches are being played on a big global stage.
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                Serena Williams’s final match of the 2022 U.S. Open brought in between 4.8 million and 6.9 million views, the most for a tennis match in ESPN’s history
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              <li style="margin:0 0 10px 0;line-height:27.5px">
               <span style="font-size:17px;line-height:25px;vertical-align:middle">
                A record 6.43 million viewers
               </span>
               <a class="css-sdwaa1" style="color:#286ed0;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-size:17px;line-height:25px;vertical-align:middle">
                tuned in
               </a>
               <span style="font-size:17px;line-height:25px;vertical-align:middle">
                to watch the women’s U.S. soccer team, which included Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe, play in the World Cup last year.
               </span>
              </li>
              <li style="margin:0 0 10px 0;line-height:27.5px">
               <span style="font-size:17px;line-height:25px;vertical-align:middle">
                Clark’s final college game, a loss in the N.C.A.A. championship game, drew 18.87 million viewers on ABC and ESPN, about four million more than the men’s championship game.
               </span>
              </li>
             </ul>
            </td>
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        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
         <span>
          Alex Michael, a managing director at the investment bank LionTree, said the value of stars might be increasing as media consumption continued to shift away from broadcast television. “It’s not only the live games, but just their lives — whether it’s social media or other facets of storytelling,” he said.
         </span>
        </p>
        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
         <span style="font-weight:700;font-family:arial,sans-serif;color:#000">
          The chicken-or-the-egg problem.
         </span>
         <span>
          While more viewers translate to more money for the league, it takes money to find new viewers. In 2022, the W.N.B.A. raised $75 million from an investor group
         </span>
         <a class="css-sdwaa1" style="color:#286ed0;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline">
          that includes
         </a>
         <span>
          Nike, Condoleezza Rice, Laurene Powell Jobs and Michael Dell. The league is also planning
         </span>
         <a class="css-sdwaa1" style="color:#286ed0;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline">
          multiple expansion teams
         </a>
         <span>
          that it hopes will bring in more money.
         </span>
        </p>
        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
         <span>
          The 2022 funding has gone into marketing, ad campaigns, influencer marketing and live events, Engelbert said. And some of those efforts may be paying off: This past season, the league averaged 627,000 viewers per game on ABC — still a fraction of the 1.09 million for N.B.A. games, but its most-viewed regular season in more than a decade.
         </span>
        </p>
        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
         <span>
          “The seeds were sown over the last five years for this monumental growth,” Chiney Ogwumike, a host for ESPN who was the W.N.B.A.’s first overall draft pick in 2014, told DealBook.
         </span>
        </p>
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         <span>
          As evidence of ESPN’s role in that progress, she cited pregame shows for the W.N.B.A. and an increasing number of shows about women’s college basketball.
         </span>
        </p>
        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
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          Some industry executives say it’s especially hard to ignore this stat.
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         <span>
          More than 2.4 million people tuned in to the W.N.B.A. draft, beating the previous record by more than 300 percent.
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        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
         <span>
          Bobby Sharma, the founder of Bluestone Equity Partners, who previously worked as a senior legal executive in the N.B.A. office, told DealBook that he was one of the many viewers who had tuned in for the first time.
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        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
         <span>
          “There is a real possibility we may be witnessing a transformational moment for the W.N.B.A., for the sport of basketball, and maybe even a cultural and economic shift for women’s sports in America,” he said.
         </span>
         <span style="font-style:italic">
          — Lauren Hirsch and Tania Ganguli
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            <h3 style="color:#000;font:700 17px/25px arial,sans-serif;margin:5px 0 30px 0;letter-spacing:.2px">
             <span>
              IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
             </span>
            </h3>
           </td>
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        </table>
        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
         <span style="font-weight:700;font-family:arial,sans-serif;color:#000">
          David Zaslav received $50 million last year even as Warner Bros. Discovery struggled.
         </span>
         <span>
          His
         </span>
         <a class="css-sdwaa1" style="color:#286ed0;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline">
          compensation
         </a>
         <span>
          increased 26 percent from 2022, according to a filing with the S.E.C. on Friday, even though the media group reported $3 billion in losses and a 4 percent drop in revenue for the year. Zaslav has been cutting costs since taking charge of the company after the merger of Discovery and WarnerMedia in 2022.
         </span>
        </p>
        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
         <span style="font-weight:700;font-family:arial,sans-serif;color:#000">
          A bill to split TikTok from its Chinese owner or ban it is set to progress.
         </span>
         <span>
          Speaker Mike Johnson
         </span>
         <a class="css-sdwaa1" style="color:#286ed0;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline">
          bundled the measure as part of a foreign aid package
         </a>
         <span>
          for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. The decision to tack the TikTok bill onto national security legislation could force the Senate’s hand, as its members are less likely to want to block the national security spending.
         </span>
        </p>
        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
         <span style="font-weight:700;font-family:arial,sans-serif;color:#000">
          Tesla sends Elon Musk’s $47 billion pay package back to shareholders.
         </span>
         <span>
          The electric vehicle company said it would ask investors to vote again on the agreement that its board backed in 2018. A Delaware judge declared the initial agreement void after a group of shareholders sued to block it, saying Tesla’s board was overly compliant and hadn’t disclosed how the package was agreed.
         </span>
        </p>
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        <h2 class="css-12n1aic" style="color:#000;font:700 25px/32px arial,sans-serif;margin:0 0 10px">
         <span>
          Buzzword of the week: ‘openwashing’
         </span>
        </h2>
        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
         <span>
          There’s a big debate in the tech world over whether artificial intelligence models should be “open source.” Elon Musk’s
         </span>
         <a class="css-sdwaa1" style="color:#286ed0;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline">
          lawsuit against OpenAI
         </a>
         <span>
          and its chief executive, Sam Altman, centers on claims the company diverged from its mission of openness and has become a de facto unit of Microsoft. The Biden administration is
         </span>
         <a class="css-sdwaa1" style="color:#286ed0;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline">
          investigating the risks and benefits of open source models
         </a>
         <span>
          .
         </span>
        </p>
        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
         <span>
          One big hiccup in the debate: While proponents of open source A.I. say it’s more equitable and safer, and detractors say transparency makes A.I. more likely to be abused, neither side agrees on what “open source” A.I. actually means. And many companies that use the label aren’t as open as the label implies.
         </span>
        </p>
        <div style="margin:0 auto;max-width:600px;width:100%">
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              <li style="margin:0 0 10px 0;line-height:27.5px">
               <span style="font-size:17px;line-height:25px;vertical-align:middle">
                OpenAI discloses little about its models.
               </span>
              </li>
              <li style="margin:0 0 10px 0;line-height:27.5px">
               <span style="font-size:17px;line-height:25px;vertical-align:middle">
                Meta labels its LLaMA 2 and LLaMA 3 models as open source but puts restrictions on their use.
               </span>
              </li>
              <li style="margin:0 0 10px 0;line-height:27.5px">
               <span style="font-size:17px;line-height:25px;vertical-align:middle">
                Other models, mostly run by nonprofits, disclose more than Meta does, including the source code and underlying training data, and use an open source license that allows for wide reuse. But even these most open models do not by themselves allow for others to replicate them.
               </span>
              </li>
             </ul>
            </td>
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        </div>
        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
         <span>
          Some experts say the use of the label for A.I. is at best misleading and at worst a marketing tool to suggest a more democratic approach — a use that’s called “openwashing.”
         </span>
        </p>
        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
         <span>
          “Even maximally open A.I. systems do not allow open access to the resources necessary to ‘democratize’ access to A.I., or enable full scrutiny,” said David Widder, a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell Tech who has studied
         </span>
         <a class="css-sdwaa1" style="color:#286ed0;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline">
          use of the “open source” label by A.I. companies
         </a>
         <span>
          . Only a handful of companies can fund the compute power and data curation required to build an A.I. model.
         </span>
        </p>
        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
         <span style="font-weight:700;font-family:arial,sans-serif;color:#000">
          Efforts to create a clearer definition are underway.
         </span>
         <span>
          Researchers at the nonprofit Linux Foundation last month
         </span>
         <a class="css-sdwaa1" style="color:#286ed0;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline">
          published a framework
         </a>
         <span>
          that places open source A.I. models into different categories. And the Open Source Initiative, another nonprofit group, is trying to
         </span>
         <a class="css-sdwaa1" style="color:#286ed0;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline">
          draft a definition
         </a>
         <span>
          .
         </span>
        </p>
        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
         <span>
          But Widder and others doubt that truly open source A.I. is possible. The prohibitive resource requirements for building A.I. models, he said, “are simply not going away.”
         </span>
        </p>
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        <h2 class="css-12n1aic" style="color:#000;font:700 25px/32px arial,sans-serif;margin:0 0 10px">
         <span>
          Would you hire the fired Google protesters?
         </span>
        </h2>
        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
         <span>
          Google
         </span>
         <a class="css-sdwaa1" style="color:#286ed0;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline">
          fired 28 employees
         </a>
         <span>
          this week after staff protests over its cloud computing contract with Israel. Dozens of workers joined sit-ins at offices in New York; Sunnyvale, Calif.; and Seattle. The company said physically impeding other employees’ work was a clear violation of its policies, while the group that organized the protests said the firings were a “flagrant act of retaliation.”
         </span>
        </p>
        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
         <span>
          DealBook wants to hear from you: Would you hire an employee whom Google fired for protesting its decisions? Let us know
         </span>
         <a class="css-sdwaa1" style="color:#286ed0;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline">
          here
         </a>
         <span>
          .
         </span>
        </p>
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        <h2 class="css-12n1aic" style="color:#000;font:700 25px/32px arial,sans-serif;margin:0 0 10px">
         <span>
          On our radar: ‘The Everything War’
         </span>
        </h2>
        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
         <span>
          Amazon’s evolution from scrappy online book retailer to a top player in ecommerce, cloud computing and digital advertising is an extraordinary tale of the internet age.
         </span>
        </p>
        <p style="font:normal 17px/25px georgia,serif;color:#333;margin:0 0 15px">
         <span>
          In “The Everything War,” The Wall Street Journal’s Dana Mattioli uncovers the tactics behind Amazon’s rise. Mattioli illustrates her investigation with exclusive anecdotes gleaned from 600 interviews with employees, partners, competitors and regulators, as well as a review of hundreds of pages of internal documents. The book makes for a topical read ahead of the trial for the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, which is set for October 2026.
         </span>
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