WatchESPN drew a record audience for any event on the digital platform for Monday's U.S.-Ghana FIFA World Cup match, as 1.4 million unique viewers watched the action. Germany-Portugal earlier in the day drew 1.1 million unique viewers, which ranks No. 2 all-time. Monday was WatchESPN best day ever with 2.7 million devices consuming 191 million minutes of World Cup action. It also marked the third day since the start of the World Cup that WatchESPN has set a new daily record. Meanwhile, the first five days of the World Cup marked Univision Digital’s five most-visited days ever. Monday was Univision Digital’s top day for traffic on record with 8.0 million visits. Germany-Portugal was actually Univision’s top digital stream with 2.0 million viewers, ahead of the 1.7 million views for U.S.-Ghana. The Univision Deportes app also continues to rank among the top five free sports apps since the start of the World Cup in both the Google Play and Apple app stores (Austin Karp, Assistant Managing Editor). VARIETY's Todd Spangler reports Germany-Portugal is second only to last Friday's Mexico-Cameroon match for Univision, which generated 2.8 million views. That set a "record for a U.S. sporting event," topping the previous high of 2.1 million online viewers for NBC’s USA-Canada men's hockey semifinal game from the Sochi Olympics. The World Cup has "already broken the record for peak amount of online-video streaming bandwidth as delivered by Akamai Technologies." Germany-Portugal "drove a peak of 4.3 terabits per second of streaming video on Akamai’s content-delivery network, blowing past the previous high of 3.5 Tbps" for the U.S.-Canada hockey game. The streaming-video peak for U.S.-Ghana "came in at 3.2 Tbps, behind last Friday’s 3.4 Tbps for the Spain-Netherlands contest" (VARIETY.com, 6/17).
SOCIAL SECURITY: The U.S.-Ghana match topped Nielsen Media’s Twitter TV ratings for sports events on Monday with 3.1 million tweets written by 1.1 million unique authors. Those tweets were seen by a unique audience of 11.2 million people, generating 256.8 million Twitter TV impressions. The No. 2 sports event on Monday was Germany-Portugal, with 1.2 million tweets for a unique audience of 7.9 million people. By comparison, Mets-Cardinals ranked No. 4 with 22,000 tweets for unique audience of 943,000 people. Facebook saw 10 million users have more than 15 million interactions on the social media platform related to U.S.-Ghana on Monday. Males 25-34 were the top demo for the interaction, with U.S. D John Brooks’ game-winning goal being the most-social moment (Karp).
