World Cup Viewership: Young Chinese fans focus more on fun than games

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03:02

A thrilling 32 days of World Cup football wrapped up with France defeating Croatia 4-2 on Sunday to win its first title in 20 years. That came as a survey in China showed that young fans paid more attention to other things than the games themselves and that had a lot to do with their mobile phones. Zheng Junfeng reports on digital viewership of the World Cup in China.

Watching a World Cup game from beginning to end, that's no longer the trend for Chinese fans. A survey conducted by Analysys on thousands of World Cup fans shows that most of the fans learned about the games from their mobile phones.

JIANG XINWEI, SENIOR ANALYST ANALYSYS "Over 70 percent of the football fans in China will use their phones while watching a World Cup game, either reading, sharing, chatting, betting or even shopping."

That's very different from four years ago when fans would just watch TV. Now their attention span isn't 90 minutes, but just a few minutes or seconds. Tencent Online Media was voted in the survey as the most favored platform for World Cup information for its creative content and short videos.

SANDI JIN, MARKETING DIRECTOR TENCENT ONLINE MEDIA GROUP "Young people prefer short videos to a whole 90-minute game. That's why our short videos are very popular, with 6.7 billion views by 770 million users during the World Cup."

The survey also showed that the World Cup was a catalyst, for fans to create conversations such as football star gossip. Some funny short videos and user-generated content can quickly go viral with hundreds of millions of views.

SANDI JIN, MARKETING DIRECTOR TENCENT ONLINE MEDIA GROUP "Content creation is the key, whether it's Japanese team cleaning their locker room or half of Iceland players are part-time. These stories went viral because Chinese users like to express their opinions. That's why we had a team of 1100 people reporting and editing for the World Cup."

Andy Mok, a digital economy observer, says the large World Cup viewership on China's mobile internet was game-changing, and was made possible by technology, user base and content creation.

ANDY MOK, CEO RED PAGODA RESOURCES "The smart phone revolution totally reinvented the viewing content participation experience. It used to be many people around one screen, passively absorbing content. Today, it's a multi-screen experience and this is the way, especially the young people, consuming, creating and distributing digital content."

Mok says that for future sports events viewership, whoever wants to win customers will have to be able to crack the code of young consumer behavior and deliver content at mobile internet speeds. ZJF, CGTN.