Emma Raducanu top in Google searches for British women’s sports stars – third overall in media coverage
Emma Raducanu remains the most Googled active British women’s sports star and also tops the lists when it comes to media coverage for British tennis players, but she is third in the overall standings of media mentions.
2021 US Open champion Raducanu has an average monthly search volume of 1,830,000 and a recent study conducted by sport retailer Runners Need on the gender gap in media coverage found she is third in the overall list of media coverage for active British sports stars.
The research on the media and social media coverage on the UK’s top performing men’s and women’s sports stars was done over a six-month period from April to October 2022 – on average top women’s sports players receive 3.6x times less coverage than their male counterparts.
England football captain Harry Kane topped the list with about 178,000 mentions, but his positive-negative sentiment ratio was 55.2% (positive) to 44.8% while only three per cent of his mentions were high profile.
Cricket captain Ben Stokes was a distant second with 78 514 mentions and 70.4% of his mentions were positive with five per cent high-profile.
Raducanu was the best performing woman as she came in third with 59,740 mentions – her positive-negative sentiment ratio was 66% to 34% with six per-cent of all mentions high-profile.
The former WTA No 10 was also the top tennis player as British men’s No 1 Cameron Norrie received 40,523 mentions with his positive sentiment ratio 77%.
August saw Raducanu’s monthly Google search volume reaching 2,740,000 – the highest figure of a single sportsperson in the study – as it coincided with her US Open title defence coming to an end in the first round at Flushing Meadows.
Her best month for media mentions was also August as she received 22,918 mentions, with Norrie second as he had 18,596 mentions in July when he reached the semi-final of Wimbledon.
Of current sports stars, Raducanu is second on the list of Instagram followers with Kane top with 13.1m and Raducanu on 2.5m. Kane had 401,000 hashtags, Stokes 166,000 and Raducanu 39,100.
The study also found that women’s sports players receive on average one in 10 hashtags and two out of 10 follows.
Other study findings:
– Male sports stars received 78% of all the media mentions, and on Instagram 84% of all follows and 91% of all hashtags.
– Women were more likely to be spoken about positively (with a 76.5% positive sentiment rating, compared to men’s 61.6%) and the mentions were more likely to be deemed important (at 16% compared to men’s 12%).
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