Emma Raducanu news: Some more mind-boggling media engagement stats after US Open success

Tennis News
Emma Radacanu with the US Open trophy

Emma Raducanu’s extraordinary US Open triumph had a profound impact on the media last year, including television, streaming services, Google searches and social media.

Teenager Raducanu stunned the sporting world in September 2021 when she became the first qualifier – man or woman – to win a Grand Slam as she won 10 matches without dropping a set en route to lifting the US Open trophy.

She went from a relatively obscure 18-year-old, who only made her major debut at Wimbledon that year, to one of the most talked about sports stars as everyone from the Queen, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, tennis royalty and even musician Liam Gallagher paid tribute to her.

Not long after she signed several lucrative sponsorship agreements, including deals with Dior, Tiffany & Co, British Airways and Evian.

Unsurprisingly she was one of the most Googled people last year, but figures released on the back of research done by Futures Sport and Entertainment in conjunction with Women’s Sport Trust still surprised.

It was confirmed last week that her name generated eight million Google searches in the UK last year.

And that is not the end as more figures released by the Women’s Sport Trust show some incredible rises in searches and engagements in women’s sports that were attributed to Raducanu.

Google searches

• Searches for Emma Raducanu in a single week in September were close to searches for Olympic gold medallist Tom Daley in the whole of 2021
• There were more searches in the teenagers in a single week than the combined total for cricketers Joe Root and Ben Stokes, and Olympic cyclist Jason Kenny across the year
• Raducanu’s peak weekly level of search interest in September is behind only peaks seen for the likes of boxers Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua

Other figures

• The 2021 US Open final between Raducanu and Leylah Fernandez was the most watched women’s tennis match in Britain in at least 30 years
• Amazon Prime Video reported that the Raducanu-Fernandez match was their most streamed tennis match ever
• The final was watched by a peak 9.2 million on free-to-air Channel 4
• The match attracted 12.5m viewers with 48% share of 16-34 year olds & 50:50 gender split
• Raducanu featured in four of the top 10 most visited women’s sport stories on Sky Sports’ website in 2021

Instagram

• Raducanu had under 10k Instagram followers at the start of 2021, but by the end of the year it had surged to 2.165m
• Her Instagram account generated 13.66m interactions
• The teenager is now the most followed British tennis player on Instagram and is only behind Naomi Osaka in terms of global tennis players under 30

Emma Raducanu

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