World Cup Scores With New Zealand Surfers

12-06-02

While rugby and cricket might still be the crowd favourites in NZ, the FIFA World Cup is scoring a lot of attention from New Zealand sports fans this week. With the first World Cup match taking place on June 1, recent Hitwise New Zealand statistics have reflected a huge jump in traffic to World Cup websites, which are vying for attention with the traditional Sports category chart-toppers.

FIFA’s official World Cup website (fifaworldcup.yahoo.com) is clearly one of the category’s fastest movers. Last week saw the site rocket up from 17 to 4 in the global Sports category, while May overall witnessed an impressive leap from 75 to 17. The average time spent on the site has also steadily increased as World Cup excitement mounts, with the March average of 3 minutes, 19 seconds more than tripled to this week’s 11 minutes 51 seconds, as visitors take extra time to peruse the latest match results and video highlights of recent games.

The FIFA World Cup website is being hosted by Yahoo! this year, and the flow-on effect for other Yahoo! sites is significant – Hitwise Clickstream data shows that 6 of the top 20 downstream sites from fifaworldcup.yahoo.com are Yahoo!-hosted domains, including Yahoo! Shopping (shopping.yahoo.com) and Radio (radio.yahoo.com).

The official Fifa Website and other World Cup websites have contributed to the current domination of the Soccer subcategory in Hitwise, which is currently claiming 36.8% of traffic within the Sports parent category for the week ending 8 June. The Soccer subcategory is streaking ahead of closest rivals Cricket (4.2%) and Rugby Union (3.5%), with the Fifa World Cup 2002 site (fifaworldcup.yahoo.com) leading the Sports category overall, with a consistent 11.53% category share during week ending 8 June.

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