News platform records 4.1b hits during FIFA World Cup

Developer infoplum now gearing up for Cricket World Cup 2015

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A news, video and photo platform developed for the FIFA World Cup recorded 4.1 billion hits during the tournament in 2014 as soccer fans from around the world tuned in online.

Australian scoreboard app developer, infoplum, built the platform for Agence France-Presse (AFP), an international news agency that delivers content to 100 news organisations around the world including Fairfax in Australia.

The platform was hosted by Rackspace Cloud Sites. According to Rackspace, it recorded 4.1 billion hits while analytical analysis found there were 100 million page views, 10 million unique users and an average news site visit time of 12 minutes during 12 June to 13 July 2014.

According to infoplum technical director Trevor George, one of the biggest spikes was during the Portugal versus Germany game.

“We were ready for traffic spikes and could cope with it,” he said. “The key learnings [from the tournament] were planning and making sure that you’ve got the architecture right.”

By using Cloud Sites, the infoplum team could focus on developing a platform that could process large sets of data, rather than worrying about infrastructure, said George.

The partnership between AFP, infoplum and Rackspace will continue for the Asian Cup soccer tournament from 10 to 23 January 2015 and the Cricket World Cup from 14 February to 29 March 2015, which will take place in Australia and New Zealand.

“We don’t expect the Asian Cup to be at the scale of the [FIFA] World Cup, but having said that from a broadcast perspective we are expecting record numbers because Asia is the fastest growing confederation of football,” said George.

According to AFP Asia Pacific's deputy sales and marketing director, Nicolas Giraudon, “content is king but technology is queen” for the global news agency.

“The journalists were extremely happy to see their content published right away because usually we are in a business where we licence content to media such as Fairfax. We don’t see our content coming online immediately because they [Fairfax] decide what they are going to publish,” he said.

“With this [platform], our journalists publish directly into the application built by infoplum in the multimedia environment hosted by Rackspace. They immediately saw the results.”