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 searched, and 2024 was no different. The predictable people and events were driving the news — Taylor Swift and Caitlin Clark, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, the Olympics and the solar eclipse — and just like every year, Yahoo visitors remind us they loooove 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 — trad wives, anyone? — so we analyzed Yahoo Search data from Jan. 1 to Nov. 30, 2024, to uncover the most unique trends. Here’s our Class of 2024 … and, yes, we tackle what each state is watching and the controversial cats vs. dogs.
Taylor Swift: A love story
Most of you know all too well that no one sold out an arena like Swift, who 11 million fans followed on an epic “Eras Tour,” which ended Dec. 8 in Vancouver, Canada.
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Final gross ticket sales were most people’s, ahem, wildest dreams. The 21-month tour sold a record $2 billion in tickets, which the New York Times reported is double that of any other concert tour in history. Is that why so many of you peeked at Swift’s net worth in 2024? It was the third-most-popular search related to the 14-time Grammy winner, who generated more interest than the entire British royal family.
On average, 3% of stories read on Yahoo News each month were related to Swift. There were more searches about her this year than the next 36 artists combined.
Enter Kansas City Chiefs star and boyfriend 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, as Kansas City won Super Bowl LVIII and Kelce his third championship ring — with Swift in attendance, of course.
But even Kelce couldn’t top Clark as the biggest name in sports 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 season. Attendance went from among the league’s lowest to No. 1 for both home and away games. The 2024 Rookie of the Year winner was so popular that even a misspelling of her name ranked in the top 50 searches.
With a couple of assists from other rookies, the point guard helped break WNBA viewership records on six networks this year, Yahoo Sports reported. Half those games were against longtime rival Angel Reese, who along with Cameron Brink ranked among the year’s most-searched athletes, helping boost WNBA-related searches 397% since last season.
The skew toward the WNBA becomes even more striking when considering 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 the fact that those NBA players earned more than 300 times the annual salary of their female counterparts ($150,227,100 vs. $578,040).
Cocktails keep it classic
Was there a Carpenter effect on this year’s top cocktails? Please, please, please.
The catchy “Espresso” hit No. 1 on the charts in June, and espresso martinis appeared as a top cocktail search across 80% of the country. While cocktail preferences traditionally vary seasonally — old-fashioneds in fall and winter, mint juleps in spring, and margaritas in summer — espresso martinis maintained a top-four spot all year.
Even so we found regional preferences reign supreme. Nowhere, it seems, were users’ drink choices more pronounced than South Carolina and Hawaii, where you might want to order a mint julep or mai tai, respectively, next time you visit.
No land grab for ‘Yellowstone’
Viewers didn’t need more reasons to talk about “Yellowstone,” and yet Kevin Costner walking away from the hit series to pursue his passion project, “Horizon,” set up a two-year wait and final half of Season 5 none of us expected. The long-awaited and equally controversial John Dutton send-off in the premiere only piqued Yahoo users’ interest further. While searches for the show remained popular across the country all year, Oklahoma had a unique interest in Costner. A typical Yahoo user in Oklahoma searched for the actor four times as much as one in Connecticut this year.
While everyone has their favorite shows, we see popularity among genres shift with the seasons. Sci-fi was most popular search in spring and summer, before viewers switched to crime dramas in the fall and winter. Searches for reality TV dating shows also saw an uptick in the fall.
Superheroes, defeated
When it comes to Yahoo visitors, “Virginia is for lovers” rings true. It topped the list of states that searched for romantic comedies this year. But the most-searched movie wasn’t exactly heartwarming — far from it. “Oppenheimer,” a tense biopic about the creator of the atomic bomb, won seven Academy Awards in March and topped searches across much of the U.S. Yahoo users searched for “Oppenheimer” four times as much per capita as they did “Barbie,” which didn’t rank as the top search in any state.
This one’s for the cat lovers
Let’s wrap 2024 with a timeless question: Cats or dogs? According to this year’s searches, it’s cats for most of you — 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 analyses 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.
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