The World Cup’s Online & Mobile Audience
July 14th, 2010
The World Cup made its month long appearance this Summer to record interest here in the United States. While soccer has never caught on entirely here, it still is considered “The World’s Game.” With ESPN paying a lot of money ($100 million for English speaking rights through 2014), they tried to take full advantage by offering the games not just on television, but online and on mobile devices. Now to watch online, you did need to have an Internet Service Provider that had an agreement for their service and to watch on your mobile device, you needed to pay a fee for their App. In total, nearly 8.5 million unique users (7.4 million online over 1 million by mobile) accessed the World Cup streams during the tournament They consumed 17.2 million hours of coverage.
The only comparable sporting event to try this was CBS during the March Madness tournament. This past year, they streamed 11.7 million hours of coverage, a 36% growth from the previous year. With their success and ESPN’s success during the World Cup, it will be interesting to see how the networks begin to utilize the online medium more and more to bring users new content.
