The 2010 World Cup Final had an estimated TV audience of 700m

"Spanish broadcasters said Ole! to record ratings as nearly 17 million fans watched the country's one-nil victory over the Netherlands in the finals of football's World Cup, part of about 700 million viewers estimated to have caught the match on small screens worldwide.
Some 16.8 million Spaniards -- 91 percent of the TV audience -- caught the highlight of the match, when Andres Iniesta rocketed in the winning goal in extra time giving Spain its first-ever World Cup win. On average 15.6 million people in Spain, 86 percent of the audience, watched on the three channels broadcasting the match, an all-time average record, according to ratings agency Barlovento Comunicacion.
Similarly in the Netherlands, 91 percent of the TV audience tuned into public broadcaster NOS as their Orange-mantled team failed in its third World Cup final. An average of 8.5 million Dutch caught the match, with millions more watching in pubs and public squares across the country. (Spain's population is 46 million vs. 17 million for the Netherlands.)
Though final figures aren't available, soccer's governing body FIFA estimates around 700 million people watched the final live. If that is correct, the match would beat out the estimated 600 million that caught the opening ceremony at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and would be on par, or slightly above, the 700 million that watched the World Cup final four years ago."

Source:  Reuters, 13th July 2010

Note - Neilsen say that over 2 billion saw the 2008 Olympic Opening Ceremony

A new record for the number of tweets per second was set at the Women's World Cup Final

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Source:  Tweet from Twitter's official account, 17th July 2011

Akamai World Cup highlights

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Source:  Akamai Official statistics, August 2010

adidas was the most mentioned World Cup sponsor in blog posts relating to the tournament

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"Which sponsor benefited the most from its involvement with the World Cup?
To get a handle who prevailed within the blogging landscape, we used MAP (our flagship analytics service) to compare activity between FIFA’s sponsorship “partners” – Sony, Visa, Hyundai, Kia, Emirates, Coca-Cola and Adidas.
Using the query “company name” AND “World Cup”, the winner by a wide margin was Adidas, which captured 42.2% of total blog activity. Sony was second with 20.2%, while Coca-Cola was third with 12.2%."
Source:   Sysomos blog, 13th July 2010

During the World Cup final people from 172 countries tweeted in 27 different languages

"The World Cup final represented the largest period of sustained activity for an event in Twitter’s history.
Throughout the match, Tweets-per-second (TPS) were much higher than average; during the game’s final 15 minutes, this jumped to more than 2,000 TPS. (Spain’s winning goal in the final scored a 3,051 TPS.)
During the final, people from 172 countries tweeted in 27 different languages.
At the moment of the winning goal, people from 81 countries tweeted in 23 different languages. This moment is represented on this Wordle infographic."
Source:  Twitter blog, 15th July 2010

Next Generation Media Quarterly - July 2010

My new Next Generation Media Quarterly presentation is now online. Lots of cool stats and examples, many of which will be familiar to readers of this, and my 'examples' blog, but this time with a couple of new features:

1 - a 'quiz' slide at the end of each section

2 - a special section on sport in honour of the World Cup

Next Generation Media Quarterly - July 2010

View more presentations from Dan Calladine.

Have a look!

Four of the six biggest levels of internet usage occurred at the 2010 World Cup

The highest recorded internet usage of 20.7m visitors to news sites per minute was on 24th June 2010, when Denmark played Japan, and Cameroon played the Netherlands, while the longest running tennis game was taking place at Wimbledon.

The top 6 events are shown below

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Source: Akamai Net Usage Index, retrieved 14th July 2010
From their notes:
"The highest peaks since inception of the Net Usage Index for News (August 18, 2005), based on total visitors per minutes. The following data ranks the top peaks, and the corresponding events that were taking place in the world at the time."

Coca Cola's World Cup 'promoted trend' on twitter generated 86 million impressions with a 6% engagement rate

"Coca-Cola saw “phenomenal” results from its first experiment with paid advertising on Twitter, the drinks company’s digital marketing chief told the Financial Times.
The US soft drinks company is only the second brand to sponsor a “trending topic”, using Twitter’s “promoted tweets” to tap into online discussion about the World Cup this week.
It saw 86m “impressions” or views of the ads in 24 hours, said Carol Kruse, vice-president for global interactive marketing at Coca-Cola, which is an official sponsor of the football tournament.
Coke also saw an “engagement rate” of 6 per cent, compared with the approximately 0.02 per cent of people who click on a regular online advertisement."
Source: Carol Kruse of Coca Cola, reported by the Financial Times, 25th June 2010
Note - 6% x 86m = 5,160,000 engagements

The England Vs. USA World Cup match had 19m viewers in the UK and 17m in the USA

"TV1's coverage of England's 1-1 World Cup draw with the USA peaked with nearly 20 million viewers on Saturday, 12 June.
ITV1 HD's coverage of the match suffered an embarrassing fault after it cut to an ad break just as Steven Gerrard scored England's goal. There was no interruption to ITV1.
World Cup Live averaged 13.160 million viewers and a 56% share of the audience, between 6.15pm and 9.45pm, according to unofficial overnight figures.
The game itself, which kicked off at 7.30pm, averaged 17.65 million, with a 15-minute peak of 19.415 million – a 69.8% share – between 9pm and 9.15pm."
Source: BARB data, reported by The Guardian, 14th June 2010

"Viewership for the 2010 FIFA World Cup is up significantly on ESPN/ABC and Univision.
Through Sunday, the World Cup is averaging a 2.6 U.S. rating and 4.2 million viewers on ESPN and ABC, up 63% in ratings and 80% in viewership from the comparable point in 2006 (1.6, 2.3 mil).
ABC drew a 2.8 rating and 4.7 million viewers for Sunday's Germany/Australia match, according to Nielsen fast-nationals, up 27% in ratings and 40% in viewership from Mexico/Iran on the first Sunday of the 2006 World Cup (2.2, 3.3 mil).
Also on Sunday, ESPN drew a 2.0 and 3.0 million for Serbia/Ghana.
Not surprisingly, Saturday's USA/England match on ABC stands as the top telecast of the World Cup, with a 7.3 and 13.0 million viewers.
Over on Univision, the World Cup averaged 3.2 million viewers for the first two days, up 49% from 2006.
Saturday's USA/England match drew 4.1 million viewers on Univision, the second-largest audience ever for a USA match on the network. USA/England is not the network's top telecast of this year's World Cup, however; the Mexico/South Africa opener drew 5.4 million viewers."
Source: SportsMediaWatch, 14th June 2010

The World Cup has created the highest ever levels of internet usage

"World Cup fever pushed the Internet to a new record on Friday, according to measurements from Akamai.
Traffic to news sites globally started a steady climb about 6 a.m. Eastern time and peaked six hours later at noon, reaching nearly 12.1 million visitors per minute.
The traffic dipped going into the afternoon but stayed well above normal. The figures suggest that the Internet was most active during the Mexico-South Africa game and stayed heavy through the France-Uruguay game.
The day's traffic far exceeded the previous record of 8.5 million visitors per minute, which was set when Barack Obama won the U.S. presidential election in 2008."
Source: Data from Akamai, reported by CNET, 12th June 2010