Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Emma McIntyre/TAS24/Getty Images, Randy Holmes/ABC via Getty Images, Todd Rosenberg/Getty Images
You can tell a lot about a year by looking at what people were looking for, and 2024 was no different. The predictable people and events shaped the news – Taylor Swift and Caitlin Clark, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, the Olympics and the solar eclipse – and as they do every year, Yahoo visitors remind us that they love football. (No, seriously… there were more searches related to the NFL than the NBA, MLB, NHL and WNBA combined.)
But it’s the surprising searches that tell the definitive story of a year: traditional women, anyone? – so we analyzed Yahoo Search data from January 1 to November 30, 2024 to uncover the most unique trends. Here’s our class of 2024…and yes, we’re addressing what each state is looking at and the controversial cats vs. dogs.
Taylor Swift: A love story
Most of you know all too well that no one has sold out an arena like Swift, who was followed by 11 million fans during an epic “Eras Tour” that ended on December 8 in Vancouver, Canada.
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The final gross ticket sales were most people’s, ahem, wildest dreams. The 21-month tour sold a record $2 billion in tickets, which, according to the New York Times, is double the amount of any other concert tour in history. Is that why so many of you have been looking at Swift’s net worth in 2024? It was the third most popular search related to the fourteen-time Grammy winner, generating more interest than the entire British Royal Family.
On average, 3% of stories read monthly on Yahoo News related to Swift. She had more searches this year than the next 36 artists combined.
Enter Kansas City Chiefs star and friend Travis Kelce.
While Swift was popular across the country, Kansas had the highest search rate, followed by Missouri. Interest in Swift peaked in February, with more than 100 million views on 5,000 articles, when Kansas City won Super Bowl LVIII and Kelce won his third championship ring — with Swift there, of course.
But even Kelce couldn’t surpass Clark as the biggest name in the sport this year.
Catching Caitlin Clark fever
When the college star took her game to the WNBA in 2024, the Indiana Fever quadrupled ticket sales and became the first team to draw more than 300,000 fans in a single season. Attendance went from the lowest in the league to number 1 for both home and away games. The 2024 Rookie of the Year winner was so popular that even a spelling mistake in her name ended up in the top 50 searches.
With a pair of assists from other rookies, the point guard helped break WNBA viewership records on six networks this year, Yahoo Sports reported. Half of those games were against longtime rival Angel Reese, who along with Cameron Brink were among the most searched for athletes of the year, driving WNBA-related searches up 397% since last season.
The bias toward the WNBA becomes even more striking when you look at the salaries top players in each league earn. The top five WNBA players accounted for nearly twice as many searches as the top five NBA players, despite those NBA players earning more than 300 times the annual salary of their female counterparts ($150,227,100 versus $578,040).
Cocktails keep it classic
Was there a Carpenter effect on this year’s top cocktails? Please, please, please.
The catchy ‘Espresso’ reached No. 1 on the charts in June, and espresso martinis emerged as one of the most popular cocktails in 80% of the country. While cocktail preferences traditionally vary seasonally—old fashioneds in the fall and winter, mint juleps in the spring and margaritas in the summer—espresso martinis maintained a top four position year-round.
Yet we noticed that regional preferences predominated. Nowhere, it seems, have users’ drink choices been more pronounced than in South Carolina and Hawaii, where you might want to order a mint julep or mai tai the next time you visit.
No land grab for ‘Yellowstone’
Viewers didn’t need more reasons to talk about ‘Yellowstone,’ and yet Kevin Costner walked away from the hit series to pursue his passion project ‘Horizon,’ setting up a two-year wait and the last half of season 5, no one expected of us. John Dutton’s long-awaited and equally controversial farewell at the premiere only further piqued the interest of Yahoo users. While searches for the show remained popular across the country throughout the year, Oklahoma took a unique interest in Costner. A typical Yahoo user in Oklahoma searched for the actor four times as much this year as one in Connecticut.
Although everyone has their favorite shows, we see that the popularity of the genres changes with the seasons. Sci-fi was the most popular search in the spring and summer, before viewers switched to crime dramas in the fall and winter. Searches for reality TV dating shows also saw an increase in the fall.
Superheroes, defeated
When it comes to Yahoo visitors, “Virginia is for lovers” is true. It topped the list of states looking for romantic comedies this year. But the most searched for movie wasn’t exactly heartwarming, far from it. “Oppenheimer,” a suspenseful biopic about the creator of the atomic bomb, won seven Academy Awards in March and topped search results among a large share of U.S. Yahoo users who searched for “Oppenheimer” four times as much per capita as to “Barbie,” which did not rank as the top search in any state.
This one is for the cat lovers
Let’s end 2024 with a timeless question: cats or dogs? According to this year’s searches, for most of you, it’s cats, especially in Louisiana, where there were five times more cat-related searches than the average state.
Our Yahoo Trends in 2024 report is based on analysis of internal data from January to November 2024. The project was led by Robin Kwong and Coleen O’Lear. Mark Bowers, Kent Johnson, Mike Bebernes, Jenn Rourke and Ed Hornick contributed.
