Youku and Migu Video post viewing numbers from this year’s World Cup

As France won its second World Cup after beating Croatia on July 15, Chinese video streamers are also busy celebrating their soaring viewerships.

Migu Video, a subsidiary of state-owned telecommunication giant China Mobile, announced on Weibo that the Word Cup matches received more 4.3 billion views in total and more than 200 million views of the final game. Alibaba backed-Youku, the other of the two platforms that had the right to stream the World Cup matches, reported more than 180 million users, 14 percent of China’s population, watched the game during the period and 24 million watched final in a press release. Neither of these numbers has been confirmed by a third party.

However, these two platforms didn’t broadcast the game live directly from Russia. These two platforms cooperated with CCTV-5, the sports channel of the China Central Television family of networks. CCTV-5 is the sole broadcaster of all FIFA games in China between 2018 and 2022. Thus, when watching the matches on Youku or Migu, the CCTV-5 logo was still present on the top left corner. CCTV5 had 22 million viewers of the first match of the World Cup while Youku reported  12 million.

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