Advertisers to note: World Cup is the world’s biggest sporting event – online
Spain was the big winner at the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa. But, another winner is ESPN and other broadcasters around the world who reportedly logged 26.7 million hours of online viewing in the U.S. alone – clearly making this year’s soccer tournament the largest online sporting event in history.
Here are some final stats from ESPN, Nielsen, Univision, and others:
ESPN3.com clocked nearly 7.4 million unique viewers, generating 15.7 million hours of viewing. 355,000 people per minute tuned in for the semifinal between Germany and Spain, which makes it ESPN3′s largest average audience ever for a live online sporting event. The network’s World Cup app was downloaded more than 2.5 million times, and it was accessed by 1 million users per day on average.
Univisionfutbol.com site streamed more than 10 million hours of live video throughout the tournament. Users spent nearly 90 minutes on the site each day on average, with Univision tracking more than 265,000 unique media players. The network also had more than 450,000 users downloaded the Univision Futbol app since its launch. Univision tracked a combined 34.7 million visits across its online and mobile offerings throughout the tournament.
Akamai delivered more than 1.5 Tbps and 1.6 million concurrent streams at the peak across its network, serving live video streams for ESPN as well as Spain’s Prisacom, Mexico’s Televisa, and about two dozen other broadcasters worldwide.
Twitter tracked up to six million World Cup–related terms each day. This included “vuvuzela,” which inspired up to 280,000 tweets per day.
Nielsen measured the popularity of the official FIFA website, which was the biggest hit in Brazil, where 7 percent of the Web population, or 2.8 million people total, frequented it for World Cup updates. The FIFA site also was popular in the U.K. (6.9 percent of all British Internet users / 2.7 million people) and Switzerland (5.6 percent of all Swiss Internet users / 0.25 million people). Also worth noting is that most of the FIFA.com visitors are between advertisers coveted age demographic of males 18 to 34, with the exception of Germany, where 54 percent of all visitors were female.
MobiTV streamed 1.8 million hours of ESPN Mobile TV during the 31 days of the World Cup (this number includes World Cup coverage and other sporting events). The company noted that the game between the U.S. and Algeria had highest average minutes per user, and the game between Netherlands and Spain had the highest number of unique viewers.
So how does the World Cup stack up to other sporting events online?
CBS said its March Madness games had larger online audiences, clocking about 8.3 million unique users to its March Madness online player, which is more than ESPN3 had during the World Cup. However, ESPN had 15.7 million hours of live video verses CBS’s 11.7 million hours. And, if you add up ESPN3′s numbers with the ones served by Univision, you end up with 26.7 million hours of online viewing — clearly making it the largest online sporting event in the U.S.
ESPN paid FIFA $100 million for rights to the 2010 and 2014 World Cups, while Univision spent $325 million. With the next tournament scheduled for Brazil, where most of the host cities are only one hour ahead of EDT, the possibility of some prime-time telecasts could boost ratings again. South Africa is six hours ahead of EDT.
FIFA has not yet set 2014 game times.
And looking ahead, the 2022 tournament could be in the United States. FIFA’s executive committee will vote Dec. 2 on the 2018 and ‘22 sites, and while the first is expected to go to a European nation, the U.S. is favored for 2022.
Right now the U.S. has a petition with more than 910,000 signatures on it to bring the World Cup back to the U.S. You probably recall us having it in 1994.
With one million voices shouting “The Game Is In US!” you know that FIFA will hear us.
PR and Ad executives, pay attention. Next world cup in Brazil will be shown in prime time in the U.S. and if it comes back in 2018 or 2022, the revenue streams will be astronomical.
