Interest in New York Knicks point guard Jalen Brunson has grown 28x faster than interest in Victor Wembanyama — up 2,006% vs. 71%, respectively –putting Brunson in second place as the
NBA player most read about in the past seven days with 1.5 million views. This ranks him behind only LeBron James, one of the most well-known L.A. Lakers basketball players.
The data,
shared by Taboola with MediaPost on Friday, shows that people are reading and searching online for nuances about the NBA game and the World Cup and are asking longer and more detailed questions in
generative artificial intelligence (AI) search.
The NBA Finals ranked as the second-most-read topic in the U.S. during the past seven days, with more than 10 million views.
On game
days, content around the finals outpaces World Cup content by 1.5x, although the World Cup runs all season.
Following these trends through changes in AI-based search, which now enables users
to ask longer conversational-type questions, gives brands the ability to align with cultural peaks and valleys.
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The goal to capture the attention of consumers related to sports through
predictive analyses and personalized messages spans from online to offline, depending on which supports the best high-traffic times.
American Express, the NBA’s Official Payment Partner, is
seeing a 3x spike in online interest over the past 45 days, and Taboola’s generative AI tool, “DeeperDive,” logged more than 46,000 NBA Finals questions since June 1. The top trending topic was
related to ticket prices, with more than 4,000 queries around why Game 3 prices fell.
Some of this data is from Taboola’s newsroom, which is built on technology that analyzes
readership trends, such as the NBA Finals and New York Knicks in the ranking of most-read stories. On June 9, the NBA Finals and the Knicks were the No. 2 and No. 3 top stories, respectively, just
behind articles about President Trump.
The attention goes beyond search. Emarketer published a note on Thursday citing social-media numbers from the NBA and broadcast numbers from Nielsen Big
Data and Panel metrics published by ESPN, noting that the scale of the audience has delivered record numbers for digital streaming.
“The NBA Finals offers a masterclass in why live
sports are an indispensable media buy,” according to a post from Emarketer. “To maximize return on investment in this costly landscape, advertisers must treat sports not just as a standard commercial
inventory buy, but as a cross-channel engine.”
Crossing channels means moving from search to social media and to broadcast or streaming TV to get the most from performance media.
The NBA reported over 5 billion social views across TikTok, Instagram, and X through the initial games of this series.
Game 4’s 29-point comeback caused real-time fan sentiment and
search traffic to spike in the second half, proving the significance of second-screen behavior as fans scrolled, posted, and checked apps during the live broadcast, according to Emarketer.
Google Trends shows 11:28 pm EDT as the U.S. peak of Knicks search traffic, with more than 5 million searches as of 7:45 am EDT on June 11.
The rankings From Nielsen, published by ESPN,
showed that for Game One there were 16.93 million viewers and for Game 2 there were 16.43 million viewers — marking ABC’s highest-rated opening games since 2018.
Game 3 spiked to 23.8
million viewers, peaking at 26.3 million — making it the most-watched NBA Finals Game 3 in 28 years since Michael Jordan’s 1998 Bulls/Jazz series, and the single largest TV audience of this
year since the Super Bowl, according to Emarketer.
Platforms like Disney did quite well, according to Emarketer. Disney completely sold out its ad inventory ahead of Game 2, with 88
unique brands buying media.
Real-time tracking from iSpot.tv noted that national TV ad revenues across Disney platforms cleared
$82.2 million in just the first three games.
Emarketer forecasts sports advertising is projected to take 31% of all linear TV ad spend this year and sports converged TV will grow
by $5 billion from 2026 to 2030. The NBA accounts for 10% of total U.S. sports ad sales, according to Emarketer, citing MediaRadar data.
