India’s most popular mobile browser, UC Browser has carried out an interesting study of Indians about their love for game of cricket and the ongoing FIFA World Cup. UC Browser had provided comprehensive content and services for the just concluded IPL 2014 and is now offering detailed information about FIFA World Cup to millions of enthusiastic footballs fans across the country, including live scores, text broadcast, stats, photos, videos and group updates.
Despite popularity of football, the cricket fever grips the most and is liked better than soccer by Indians. Take a look at the following findings :
IPL 2014 is three times as popular as FIFA World Cup 2014 in India
According to UC Web, during the group stage, FIFA sites on UC Browser garnered 550,000 average daily Unique Visitors, among which 43.7% were from India. That’s to say, nearly 250,000 Indian users visited football sites via UC Browser everyday, generating over 1,000,000 page views daily.
Meanwhile, during the IPL 2014’s group stage, around 850,000 Indian users visited IPL sites with UC Browser every day. The number peaked during the IPL finals on 1st June, with more than one and a half million users visiting IPL sites.
Based on above data, it can be concluded that in India, cricket is three times as popular as football. However, the final coutdown for FIFA World Cup has begun and it is expected that the traffic to UC Browser will also grow and will peak on 13th and 14th July.
Keyword analysis
UC Browser provides comprehensive content and services for fans during IPL 2014 and FIFA World Cup 2014. However, there are still a lots of search requests submitted everyday via UC Browser to search engines, mainly Google and Yahoo. Surprisingly, IPL keywords are searched 2.5 times more than FIFA-related keywords.
But despite the passion of Indians for cricket, they love beautiful game of soccer also and see for yourself the results of UC Browser study:
Maharashtra has more football fans than any other states in the country
According to UC Browser’s internal data, Maharashtra has the most footballs fans among the 29 states and 7 union territories.
Most searched football players among Indian users
Messi is the most searched football player in India, followed by Ronaldo. Interestingly, Uruguayan striker Suarez quickly gained momentum in the search trend after his notorious biting incident. The other most searched footballers during FIFA World Cup 2014’s group stage are Neymar of Brazil and Thomas Muller of Germany.
Most talked about matchin group stage
The match between Argentina and Nigeria is the most talked about match in the Group stage with over 8000 comments.
