Iceland — to Russia with love
The success of the Icelandic football team is something that is on everyone’s mind this morning. The smallest country ever to qualify for the World Cup finals showed that their national soccer team means business when they won their qualification group, leaving Croatia to fight for a place in the playoffs.
The interest in soccer here in Iceland has skyrocketed, first the UEFA Euro 2016 adventure and now the World Cup means that almost everyone is watching the matches. We at Overcast are in the unique position to have actual data on online news-traffic in Iceland through our Airserve ad-platform which delivers around 50% of all banner ads to the Icelandic market.
This is a typical ad impression pattern for a normal day:
People wake up, go to work and start browsing. The graph peaks around mid-day and declines to around 7pm, then picks up again after the kids are gone to bed and then tapers off around 11pm.
This was yesterday:
Obviously a lot more action after dinner (kickoff was 6:45pm). Lets take a closer look at that evening:
As can be seen from this graph, the traffic dies down at kickoff, picks up at halftime and dies down again for the second half. At match-end the traffic goes into overdrive as everyone starts looking at the media outlets, dies down again for the player interviews and then keeps fairly steady until the players arrive at their reception at Ingólfstorg just before 11pm.
It is fascinating to see how much impact this team has had, and we, along with all of Iceland are already looking for a place to stay in Russia. We will keep following the team as well as interesting statistics. Congratulations to everyone involved, see you in Russia! Húh!
