Old Media, Not New, Is World Cup Winner

Filed in archive Business Trends on July 17, 2006

Note: this posting draws from a larger article appearing in the new york times.

The World Cup demonstrates the continuing power of live sports events to pull in the mass audiences that advertisers crave. The 2006 World Cup tournament was the first in which some new media alternatives were available to people. In several countries, live video was available on the Internet. Elsewhere, games or highlights could be watched on mobile phones.

Though reports on the use of new media have been sketchy, it appears that it played a mostly supplementary role, allowing workers to keep one eye on their team while monitoring their daily work with the other.

Mobile television gained some traction in Australia, where match times were unfavorable for conventional viewing. Customers connected to mobile highlights or full-match broadcasts about 300,000 times in the first two weeks of the World Cup, before Australia was eliminated.

Old media's successes were not limited to television. According to La Tribune, a French business newspaper, the sports daily L'Équipe sold 900,000 copies the day after France's quarterfinal victory over Brazil, nearly three times its daily average.