Media

Netflix Spectacle Made Tyson, Paul Top Trending U.S. Athletes of 2024: Google

Mike Tyson lost his fight to Jake Paul, but still catapulted himself back into the national conversation.

By Lisa Scherzer

Dec 10, 2024 | 04:54 pm

UPDATED Dec 10, 2024 | 06:23 pm

Nov 15, 2024; Arlington, Texas, UNITED STATES; Mike Tyson (black gloves) fights Jake Paul (silver gloves) at AT&T Stadium.

Kevin Jairaj-Imagn Images

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According to Google, online searches about the presidential election, Hurricane Milton, the Paris Olympics, and the “mob wife aesthetic” dominated the year.

In the sports world, when it came to top trending searches in the U.S., one familiar name stood out: Mike Tyson.

Google’s Year in Search report, released Tuesday, reveals a lot about what piqued people’s curiosity this year. The lists cover numerous categories, including news, athletes, sports teams, recipes, TV shows, celebrity duos, and meaning of trends (e.g., “brat”). These were people, names, and terms that became more popular this year or had a high spike in traffic over a sustained period in 2024 as compared to 2023.

Tyson was the top trending U.S. search among all athletes, ahead of Caitlin Clark (No. 7), Simone Biles (No. 3), and Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker (No. 8). Jake Paul was fifth. Tyson was No. 7 on Google’s top 10 trending people of 2024 (in the U.S.), along with Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden.

“Mike Tyson vs Jake Paul” also topped the list of sports team matchups, ahead of “Dodgers vs Yankees” and “Lions vs 49ers.”

On Nov. 15 former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson fought internet personality and boxer Jake Paul in a much-hyped event that streamed live on Netflix.

Paul, 27, defeated Tyson, 58, by unanimous decision in a fight that didn’t deliver the excitement many were expecting in a fight with Iron Mike, who lost in eight two-minute rounds.

The fight was a massive hit. The streamer said at its height the Tyson-Paul fight drew more than 60 million households worldwide. So many people streamed the event that Netflix experienced buffering and freezing problems, which viewers complained loudly about all over social media. “The boxing mega-event dominated social media, shattered records and even had our buffering systems on the ropes,” Netflix said in a statement after the fight.

The boxing legend earned $20 million for the fight, and as Front Office Sports reported last month, Tyson had his biggest pop culture moment since his cameo in the 2009 comedy The Hangover. Tyson has a rich—and troubled—background with a propensity to say surprising things. And it’s possible that many younger viewers of the Netflix fight who came for Jake Paul weren’t aware of Tyson’s particular place in cultural history.

Tyson, who was the youngest man to ever win a heavyweight title, retired in 2005, and has done exhibition fights more recently. His record is 50–7, 44 KOs. For a boxer whose reign as the world heavyweight champion was more than three decades ago, garnering this much attention is quite a feat. (On a global level, Tyson was second on the athlete list, while Imane Khelif, the Algerian boxer who became the center of debate over gender in sports during the Olympics, was No. 1.)

News about the Paris Olympics and Copa América, the men’s soccer tournament, were also among the most searched subjects this year.

Here are the sports-related Google Trends lists:

People