3foldComm

3fold, in general, was a little bit obsessed with the World Cup.

And those of us who tried to be (but were thwarted by a Midwestern upbringing that may have been a teensy bit ungracious to the sport of soccer) could at the very least get excited about what the World Cup did for new media and its legitimacy.

World Cup coverage by the numbers (ESPN’s at least):

• ESPN reported nearly 110,000 people per minute used its online and mobile services to access World Cup content.
• ESPN’s 2010 FIFA World Cup App was downloaded 2.5 million times to date.
• About 1.1 million devices on average accessed the app each day during the tournament.
• ESPN’s mobile properties have generated 499 million page views for ESPN World Cup content.
• ESPN3.com has attracted an average of 6.9 million unique visitors to its game broadcasts.
• The Germany-Spain semifinal game on average had about 355,000 people watching it live at any given minute—making it the most viewed live event ever on the site (no numbers yet on the final game between Spain and the Netherlands, but with 700 million viewers worldwide, I’d guess the mobile numbers are fairly impressive).
• Traffic wise, Yahoo! had 22.7 million unique visitors between June 7th and June 13th, with 7.9 million visitors directly to the World Cup Soccer site at Yahoo! ESPN reported 16.5 million unique visitors total, with a guesstimate of over 3 million for the World Cup.
• Thanks to the often office-hour timing of the games, American broadband users apparently crashed many an office server…no real numbers on this, I just mostly find it amusing (USA! USA!).

If it wasn’t clear before, it sure is clear now-new media is relevant media. What started in large part during the 2010 Winter Olympics (see our post here) has now become mainstream.

Whether it’s online, in-app, radio, or TV, people want media where they are when they are there. I can only hope the media companies desperately clinging to the old school broadcasting formulas (looking at you NFL) take note. While some, like MLB.tv, have at least made inroads, it’s not quite what it could be…as a service to the fans or as a new revenue stream…yet.

What do you think? Anyone watch the World Cup online? Follow it on an app?

Source: PaidContent.org