Football moves the masses, and the World Cup semifinals game between Brazil and Germany will appear in the annals of more than just sports, given that according to stats from Twitter, it was the most commented-upon sporting event in the history of the social network. To be specific, some 35.6 million tweets were made including the hashtags #BRA and #GER during the 90 minutes of the game.
Breaking records outside the sporting world
If we break down the evolution of the number of messages into a graphic, the Khedira goal that put Germany up 5-0 in the 29th minute sparked 580,000 tweets per minute. All this data makes the 16.4 million tweets that happened during the Chile–Brazil game, the match that till now held the record, look rather incidental.
With regard to where the messages came from, it’s revealing to analyze this animation that visually displays the areas where the tweets came from on a global map. On the Twitter Data account you can also find other interesting data such as the most-mentioned players or the average number of tweets per second.
The Twitter activity around Germany's goal flurry looks insane http://t.co/fuF0UZ8ZY3 pic.twitter.com/o0mDGtvhg6
— Matthew Lynley (@mattlynley) July 9, 2014
Football, the Internet, and a few unexpected stats
An analysis of the Twitter data can reveal certain surprising (or not so surprising) sociocultural implications beyond the obvious fact that the King Sport can move millions of people around the world. Looking, for instance, at the group-phase match between the U.S. and Germany, the website Regressing analyzed the number of time that the word Nazi was included in tweets published during the match. A total of 30,200 results appeared during the match, peaking during the minute after the German goal, which made the word appear as the trending local topic in many cities after the game.
Regardless of the scandalous 1-7 final result in favor of Germany and the unfortunate nature of the average keyword, it’s clear that the social networks, and Twitter in particular, are now a fundamental part of every broadcast, whether at the sports level or not. If we move on from social networks to usage – and to continue with ‘uncomfortable’ statistics – we find the peculiar study from the well-known sexual content portal PornHub, which analyzed German traffic entering the site before, during, and after the Germany games in the World Cup, with a decrease of up to 60% during a match and a considerable jump afterwards. Moral: celebrating happens after the game.
With regard to other downloads, Uptodown statistics were also affected by the match. The following graphic displays the number of open session in the Portuguese version of our site during Tuesday’s 24 hours, with a decrease of up to 40% in ordinary traffic during the game compared to the same time on prior days. Can you guess at what time the match kicked off?
The truly interesting thing, beyond taking measurements and analyzing statistics, is seeing how technological integration in a digital and global interaction system is a reality. TV is a less and less an isolating experience and increasingly a pure reflection of real-live trends among citizens, meaning that missing out on these sorts of studies could prove fatal for certain sectors.
