Arguably, the two biggest stars in men\u2019s tennis secured a nine-year record for ESPN over the weekend.<\/p>\n
The Australian Open men\u2019s singles final between Carlos Alcaraz and Novak Djokovic, which began Sunday at 3:30 a.m. ET on ESPN, averaged 730,000 viewers<\/a>. Alcaraz\u2019s four-set win over Djokovic marked a 57% increase over last year\u2019s AO men\u2019s final between Jannik Sinner and Alexander Zverev. It\u2019s the largest audience for a men\u2019s singles final since Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal\u2019s five-set thriller in 2017, which averaged 1.1 million viewers.<\/p>\n The men\u2019s semifinals performed well, too. A five-set win by Alcaraz over Zverev averaged more than the men\u2019s final, likely because its length allowed some viewers to wake up and watch the end. Alcaraz\u2019s win averaged 743,000 viewers, marking the second-most-watched men\u2019s semifinals since 2014.<\/p>\n The women\u2019s singles final also saw a healthy increase over last year. Elena Rybakina\u2019s win over Aryna Sabalenka averaged 487,000 viewers on ESPN, up 8% versus 2025 when American Madison Keys defeated Sabalenka.<\/p>\n Overall, the 15-day tournament saw a 29% year-over-year increase across ESPN, ESPN2, and the ESPN app, averaging 303,000 viewers per window, good for the most-watched Australian Open since 2020.<\/p>\n While Australian Open viewership data is hardly do-or-die for ESPN, considering the massive time difference, this year might\u2019ve taken on a bit of added importance because of the network\u2019s decision to move several featured early-round matches behind the ESPN Unlimited paywall. As a result, this year\u2019s Australian Open was less accessible than in prior years, where all matches aired on the much more affordable ESPN+ service.<\/p>\n That decision lost some goodwill\u00a0<\/a>among tennis fans<\/a>, but apparently not enough to prevent a trove\u00a0of them from tuning in during the overnight hours to watch the action stateside.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Arguably, the two biggest stars in men\u2019s tennis secured a nine-year record for ESPN over the weekend. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":453673,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[12083,2073,433,99,428],"class_list":{"0":"post-453672","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-australian-open","9":"tag-carlos-alcaraz","10":"tag-novak-djokovic","11":"tag-sports","12":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=453672"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453672\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/453673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=453672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=453672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=453672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}