World Cup Diary: Day 7

Well what a rubbish day Thursday was.

Middle of a World Cup and no games. Of course, it was a sensible day to have off, given it was Halloween, and the first round of games had come to an end on Wednesday night.

What it meant was a chance to try and get on top of some other work. There was still plenty of World Cup stuff to do – reaction pieces on the USA v Cook Islands match from the previous night, previews for upcoming games, and the England squad announcements.

Frustratingly, one of the “paid for” pieces (e.g. articles I don’t write) we had on the site was about the battle between Josh Charnley and his now former team-mate Pat Richards – one hour later, the England squad came out, and Charnley wasn’t in it. Cheers for that Steve.

Thursday was a good day for us content wise. To be honest, I’ve been really pleased with our coverage of the tournament so far. We’d love to do so much, but we are limited by our resources, and we’re probably going way behind what is actually feasible. It’s great to see people visiting in great numbers too – the Thursday prior to the tournament was the second most visited day in the website’s eight-year history, which shows the interest for the World Cup.

Traffic has remained relatively steady during the World Cup so far, which is good. Usually we would see a drop off around this time of year, simply because interest wanes and there isn’t much to talk about during the off-season. What that hopefully means is that we’ll see a significant improvement in our year-end figures, which will hopefully stand us in good stead to attract some much needed advertising revenue for next season.

We were still getting grief off a couple of people on social media for covering the game live on Wednesday night – how dare we. At the end of the day, we were at the game, and there to report on it live, and there are people who weren’t watching the television coverage who wanted to be up to date.

Thursday also meant the first Fantasy World Cup update of the tournament – how are you getting on?

We invest a lot of time in to the Fantasy Leagues, and it’s great to see so many people get involved.

The team of the week also came out – so even though there wasn’t a game, there was still plenty of World Cup chatter going on, and the day culminated in a positive story about the RFL hoping to get World Cup sponsors hooked on rugby league.

After that first week of games, how could they not be?

Let me take this opportunity also to ask for your Movember donations – I’m going to be rocking up at World Cup venues with a dodgy looking ‘tache in the name of charity over the next four weeks. Your support would be much appreciated: http://uk.movember.com/mospace/7240497