Lots of people have been watching the World Cup. Many of them are also tweeting about it.
The World Cup in 140 Characters: Twitter Volume Is Already Double the 2012 Olympics’
Gooooooal! Tweet! Gooooooal! Tweet! Gooooooal! Tweet!You get the picture.
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Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
Twitter says it has counted more than 300 million tweets about the tournament during its first 15 days. By way of comparison, it counted 160 million tweets during the 16 days of the London Olympics in 2012.
It would be great to know how many people are tweeting about the World Cup, but Twitter isn’t releasing that info. But via its public filings, we can at least map the change in Twitter’s user base between the two events: In the summer of 2012, Twitter had more than 150 million users; at the end of March 2014, it had around 255 million.
And while people like me are most interested in the fortunes of the U.S. team, that’s not true for Twitter users overall. Twitter says the most-tweeted about game was the opener between Brazil and Croatia — and that the next four most popular games also involved countries other than America.
This shouldn’t be surprising, since most of Twitter’s users live outside of America: As of the last quarter, 78 percent of its active users were based outside of the United States.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
