According to data of “Odnoklassniki”, interest in Internet broadcasts of matches of Russian team has grown dramatically before the upcoming World Cup. More than 7 million people watched national team’s recent test matches against Brazil and France in social network. This is almost five times more than games against Argentina and Spain in November.

Over the past six months, interest in football and matches of Russian national team in social network has grown significantly, told “Odnoklassniki” to Kommersant. Friendly matches of Russian national football team against teams of Brazil and France, which “Odnoklassniki” was broadcasting together with “Telesport” Agency, has gathered over 10 million views, the total number of viewers of two games exceeded 7 million. For comparison: in November 2017, broadcast of games with teams of Argentina and Spain scored about 2 million views and 1.5 million unique viewers in “Odnoklassniki”, Kommersant was told in social network.

The closer the World Cup, which will be held in Russia this summer, the more users follow the content dedicated to football: they actively subscribe to groups, communicate in online chats to broadcasts, share emotions, comment on publications, says representative of “Odnoklassniki”. For example, since November 2017, number of people joined football group in “Odnoklassniki” has increased two and a half times. “The audience is actively reacting to football content, and its coverage in social network is growing. In the coming months, we will work to expand the range of football content and launch several projects dedicated to World Cup,” said Marina Krasnova, Director of “Odnoklassniki” for Video and OK live products.

Involvement of the groups shows similar growth rate: users started to leave comments and “likes” to posts about football, and make reposts to their pages more often. “Odnoklassniki” show data of Brand Analytics, monitoring system in social media and media, according to which since November 2017 the number of authors and publications on World Cup in “Odnoklassniki” has grown three and a half times. In November, 9.1 thousand authors left 15 thousand messages, and in March number of authors increased to 32 thousand, they left almost 59 thousand posts. Total involvement of publications about World Cup showed an eight-fold increase, from 59 thousand reactions to more than 486 thousand.

Also, OK users began to show more interest in foreign football. Broadcasts of Spanish football championship matches, which are also organized in “Odnoklassniki” by Telesport Company, in March 2018, gained 35% more views than in November. So, if November matches of Spanish clubs collected, on average, about 366 thousand views for the stream, in March the figure had risen to 405 thousand.In total, March games of Spain Championship scored over 13 million views, compared to 7.7 million in November.

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