England exiting the 2006 FIFA World Cup tournament is bad news for online bookies. Nielsen//NetRatings reports that upon England’s departure from the World Cup, page views at sports and gambling websites dropped by 20 million.
Weekly webpages viewed peaked at 106 million during the week of June 12-18, when England faced off against Trinidad & Tobago. After England’s loss the week beginning June 26th and ending July 2nd, sports and gambling pages tanked to 83 million views.
“The performance of England’s team during the World Cup failed to live up to the hype and expectation levels of the UK online audience before the tournament began,” said Alex Burmaster, Nielsen//NetRatings’ European Internet Analyst.
“Despite the tournament driving significant numbers of people online fewer world-cup web-pages were viewed in the final week of England’s participation in the tournament than in each of the three weeks leading up to it.”
Though England fans had a significant impact on traffic, fans whose favorite teams remained in the tournament stayed fiercely loyal as the average number of total page views per visitor spiked.
“Despite the fact that world-cup related page views were significantly down in the final week of England’s participation, the official FIFA World Cup site and Sky Sports both had their strongest weeks of the tournament so far in terms of total pages viewed and the number of pages viewed per visitor.
“The official world cup site actually experienced a 58% growth in total page views compared to the average for the tournament’s first three weeks,” said Burmaster.
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