Indians at Football site
By Sameer

There are few sporting events that stop most of the world.  The Football World Cup is one of them.  Even though most of the football being played in South Africa was broadcast live late in the evening, millions of Indians watched every game.  Every English language Indian TV channel broadcast a Football Special every day with results sometimes becoming the lead news story.

ComScore which specializes in monitoring all the facts and figures of the internet has released some research based on data leading up the finals and it makes for interesting reading.  According to ComScore, Traffic to FIFA.com reached a global high on Tuesday, June 22 as the end of group play revealed which teams would advance to the next round. More than 8.7 million people visited the official World Cup destination that day, representing 1.3% of the entire global Internet audience.

India was among the top 20 countries visiting the official website FIFA.com.

An analysis of the 40+ individual countries reported by comScore showed that countries in South America showed the strongest relative visitation to FIFA.com for the week ending June 27. Chile had the highest market penetration with nearly 11% of online users in the country visiting FIFA.com during the week, followed by Argentina at 9.2%. Even without teams in the tournament, Colombia and Venezuela both posted penetration levels above 9%. World Cup host country South Africa ranked fifth at 8.3%, while Portugal had the highest penetration among European markets at 7.5%. New Zealand topped the list for the Asia-Pacific region at 7.3 percent with their June 24 match against Paraguay driving New Zealanders to the site. The U.S. witnessed a 2.4-percent reach (its highest weekly penetration of the entire World Cup) as it topped Algeria to advance to the next round of play.