Fifa considers its online presence during the 2010 Soccer World Cup a success, with three times more unique users visiting its official Web site than during the 2006 event, in Germany.
“The 2010 Fifa World Cup SA has witnessed a new level of digital engagement from fans across the globe,” says Fifa.
It adds that multimedia platforms proved central to fans' enjoyment of the World Cup. Fans accessed digital platforms like Twitter and the Fifa.com Web site.
Number-crunching
Fifa says the level of demand for its online content surpassed its expectations. It exceeded forecasts for page impressions by 1.5 billion.
“Over 220 000 people followed Fifa's official tweets on Twitter, while members of the five million-strong Fifa.com Club swapped 120 million virtual stickers and made over one million comments on the Web site as they debated the finer points of the tournament,” says the soccer governing body.
Over the course of the tournament, the Web site received over 250 million visits, with approximately 150 million unique users. A total of 48 million unique users visited the official site over the entire four weeks of the 2006 World Cup, according to Fifa.
Fifa previously reported that the number of page views in one day hit a record high of 265 million on 15 June, with the previous daily record being 250 million views on 22 June 2006. It now says it recorded 410 million page views in one day during this tournament. “When England and the US played simultaneously, Fifa.com technicians reported a throughput of one million hits per second at the height of the activity.
The total number of page views over the month-long tournament was seven billion.
Filling the gap
World Wide Worx MD Arthur Goldstuck says these figures have little to do with Internet growth in SA and everything to do with the intense global interest in the World Cup.
He adds that international soccer followers, especially in countries where the news media didn't see the World Cup as the key story of the month, would have been the ones turning to the Fifa site.
A large number of South Africans would have visited the site, but they had better local sites where they could get up to date information in a more user-friendly environment, according to Goldstuck. “Many of the local news groups... have better soccer coverage than the Fifa site.”
Goldstuck says the Internet gives followers a sense of depth where “TV only shows what's happening in front of your eyes, not what's gone before (aside from action replays), what's to be expected, and what people think about what's happening. TV may be immediate, but it has no depth within that immediacy, and that's where the Internet plugs a huge gap.”
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