By Paul Nicholson
July 7 – TV viewing figures from the US for Sunday’s Women’s World Cup final are reporting a stunning picture for soccer in the country and for the women’s game in general.
Fox reported an average 25.4 million viewers, beating the the highest rated game from last summer’s men’s tournament (18.2 million for the US vs Portugal match). What is more significant is that the figure beats the most recent NBA Finals that average 13.9 million, and the Stanley Cup (ice hockey) finals that averaged 7.6 million.
The TV phenomenon has not just been in the US but was building in markets around the world throughout the tournament.
In the quarter finals Canada’s CTV and RDS broke the Canadian viewing record for any Women’s World Cup match with an average audience of 3.2 million. Similalrly in France W9 achieved its best figures on record and set a new French digital terrestrial viewing record with an average audience of 4.1 million.
Broadcasters in Australia, Brazil, China, Korea Republic and Norway beat the highest TV audience for any match from the 2011.
An average audience of 9.3 million viewers in Japan watched their semi-final win England on Fuji TV, just below the 9.8 million fans that watched the 2011 final and more than double the audience for the 2011 semi-final on the same channel.
BBC1 drew an average audience of 1.7 million for England’s defeat against Japan, the highest figure for the given time slot on the UK state broadcaster’s prime channel this year and the largest UK audience for the 2015 edition of the competition.
The record breaking numbers are not just confined to TV viewing.
FIFA reports that its YouTube channel “smashed” its all-time monthly views record in June with 28 million views vs. 19 million in June 2014.
Other digital stats reported by FIFA include:
• 20 million unique visitors to FIFA.com FIFA Women’s World Cu section, consuming 225 million pages and spending 7.8 billion seconds engaged
• 178% increase in daily visitors to FIFA.com FIFA Women’s World Cup section compared to 2011
• 130% increase in followers for the FIFA Women’s World Cup™ Facebook Page to 662,000
• 81% increase in Twitter followers for @FIFAWWC to 222,000
• 37% increase in followers for FIFA on Instagram to 1.37 million
• 9 billion impressions of Tweets about the FIFA Women’s World Cup
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