The 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup was held this year in France and in the final match that took place on July 7th, the US team defeated the Netherlands 2 – 0. The US women’s team won the cup for this eighth edition of the quadrennial international football championship.
Journal du Geek asked our statisticians to take a look at how traffic across the involved countries was affected as fans dropped everything (including porn) to watch their favorite team play.
The last match played by France on June 28th, in which France was defeated by the US, recorded the biggest audience of the year on TF1 – the French channel who broadcasted it – with an audience of 12 million.
As you can see in the chart above, France had the biggest traffic drop during the game-time. Preparations started early with traffic dropping by 5% three hours before the match, and reaching an impressive 22% below average at 22h in the middle of the match. France supported their female team till the last second!
The United States wasn’t as engaged as France, but the day’s traffic level was already slightly below average before, during and after the match. With the United States being Pornhub’s highest traffic country, it takes a major dip in viewers to register a noticeable percent decrease, but we can still see a very slight change at 21h when the match began.
In the second chart we can see what happened during the final match between the US and the Netherlands.
Our French visitors seem to have lost interest in the match with their team no long being involved. As represented by the orange line, traffic levels were within a few percentage points of the hourly average.
The winning country US experienced a little 2% drop during the final match, possibly because of the time difference between America and Europe.
The most engaged country was the Netherlands! This country had a drop of 16% on traffic right at the beginning of the match. After that, the traffic began to slowly rise again to an average level after the end of the match.
Apparently Women’s World Cup has affected our visitors globally, because we found some changes in search term popularity. The following searches all had increases on the day of the final.
- Soccer +153%
- Soccer girl +182%
- Soccer player +199%
- Soccer mom +46%
- Football +22%
- Dutch +11%
- World cup +149%
Our visitors were getting ready for this big final match! We hope you enjoyed this edition of Pornhub Insights. To see how other sporting events affect traffic, check out our Champions League Finals post.