World Cup 2010: Yahoo! beats ESPN, wins World Cup web traffic prize

Koman's draws a crowd 

While watching the World Cup Soccer Final pitting Spain v. The Netherlands at The Republic in San Francisco, Yahoo!'s Cara Varni said that Yahoo! generated more World Cup Soccer online traffic than any other site,including ESPN, AOL, and the FIFA World Cup site itself.

That's true. Yahoo!, who's gotten more web pages for its CEO, Carol Bartz' use of profanity than on its website performance, scored the largest traffic volume from World Cup Soccer interest that's caused websites all over to set there own traffic records.

ComScore via ClickZ reports that Yahoo! racked up 22.7 million unique visitors between June 7th and June 13th, with 7.9 million visitors directly to the World Cup Soccer site at Yahoo! Meanwhile, ESPN reported 16.5 million unique visitors total, with a guesstimate of over 3 million for the World Cup.

CBSSports.com (CBS Sports) came in third with 7.4 million unique visitors.

Why did Yahoo! beat ESPN, even though ESPN had a television tie in via its cable programs and match coverage? The speculation here is that Yahoo did a great job of leading its user base to its World Cup pages.

As this is written the Yahoo! main page is dominated by World Cup Soccer news. The difference between ESPN and Yahoo is that ESPN's website is not a web service provider with an email system. Thus, it does not have that set of users who are on Yahoo! for something else, who then discover World Cup Soccer news.

What would Yahoo!'s Carol Bartz say to this news? Probably, "That's f-in great!"