World Cup occupies ‘nearly an hour a day of the average European’s online time’

At the end of a tumultuous World Cup week – which saw England qualify for the final 16, and Italy knocked out of the tournament – FIFA.com also announced further record traffic. It peaked on Wednesday 23rd, when England played Slovenia, with an unprecedented total of more than 410 million page views. 126 million of them occurred shortly after the match ended, between 5pm and 6pm local time in South Africa, when data requests from visitors reached more than one million a second.

This level of activity on FIFA.com corroborates this week’s announcement by independent Web analysts Experian Hitwise that, with 1 in 88 UK searches now World Cup-related, FIFA.com stands as the biggest recipient of 2010 FIFA World Cup traffic.

German fans spend the most time online, clocking up 76 minutes per day, followed by the Spanish (65 minutes) and the Swiss (61 minutes). UK based fans average 44 minutes per day.

The survey of 5,000 people across Europe also revealed that, at the start of the tournament, over two thirds of Europeans (71%) were planning to watch TV or go online to follow all key matches – whether involving their own team or not -- while over a quarter (27%, comprising 38% of men and 17% of women) were planning to watch at least half of all games, regardless of their own team’s success.

Spain can pride itself on the highest ratio of fans with 90% of Spanish respondents saying they would watch at least some of the matches, closely followed by Germany (89%) and the UK (62%).

www.FIFA.com

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