14 DAY TRIAL // The Word Cup seems to be on everyone’s minds and on their computers as well. As the grand sporting event gets underway, reports are showing that Internet usage is reaching all-time highs, as people flock to get the latest action from news sites or to check it out for themselves on video sites. Akamai, the operator of the world’s largest content-delivery network, which it claims carries about 20 percent of the world’s traffic on a regular day, saw its busiest day in history for news sites.
Its “Net Usage Index” page for news shows a peak of a little over 12 million visitors per minute to the news sites it hosted yesterday evening, European time, 12 P.M. in the US. That’s about 240 percent over the expected traffic for the same period of time on a regular day, which is at about five million visitors per minute.
This increase is not only due to rampant interest in the event, but also to the availability of HD streams of the matches and coverage, which can quickly gobble up bandwidth.
This shattered the previous record of over 8.5 million visitors set during the US presidential elections on November 4, 2008. The demand has since dialed down to a more normal, for this time of the day, three million visitors. The news index tracks all the news sites that Akamai carries among them being the BBC, CNN and other major organizations.
Of course, this metric doesn’t necessarily represent the Internet as a whole or even Akamai’s traffic on the whole, but the spike is significant. The event has just started and, as things progress, you can expect to see more stats from more sources. So far, Google, for example, shows that there’s a definite spike in football-related searches, a surprise to no one, but it looks like the interest may be smaller than for the 2006 World Cup.
Other 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa coverages:
- Check Out the 2010 World Cup Stadiums in Google Street View and in 3D -
Google Catches the World Cup Fever
Mozilla Kicks Off the Firefox Cup with 32 Country Personas
- Google Doodle, Search Story and Chrome Extensions (Video) - Twitter Launches Dedicated Site and ‘Hashflags’.