• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, July 13, 2010

ESPN got into a spat with CBS Sports last month when it said the U.S-Algeria World Cup match drew the largest audience ever for a sports event online with 1.1 million viewers. The sports network made no such bold claims this week about overall online ratings for the World Cup, but it did roll out some impressive numbers Tuesday nonetheless.

Time spent consuming World Cup content across all of ESPN's online and mobile properties, for instance, totaled nearly 4.9 billion minutes over the 31 days of the tournament in South Africa from June 11 to July 11.

World Cup matches on ESPN3.com, the network's broadband channel for live and on-demand coverage, drew 7.4 million unique viewers. The Spain-Germany semifinal was viewed by 355,000 people per minute during the live match, making it ESPN3's largest average audience ever.

ESPN's mobile TV offering attracted an audience of nearly 1 million viewers and totaled 93 million minutes viewing time. Its World Cup app was downloaded more than 2.5 million times and averaged a million users per day. The network said its figures for ESPN3.com and mobile TV reflected U.S. viewership. All other online and mobile audience data was global.

CBS last month challenged ESPN's claim to the biggest Web audience for a sporting event, saying that its streaming of the BYU-Florida game during the NCAA tournament earlier this year drew a slightly larger crowd than the World Cup match in which the U.S. beat Algeria 1-0.

On Tuesday, a CBS spokesperson also pointed out that the network's March Madness on Demand had a total audience of 8.3 million compared to the 7.4 million World Cup viewers on ESPN3.

But considering the NCAA tournament has become one of the premiere sporting events in the U.S., the online audience ESPN got for the World Cup -- which hasn't typically been followed as closely in the U.S. as elsewhere -- was certainly respectable by comparison, suggesting a growing interest in top-level soccer.

Increasing enthusiasm for the sport here was also highlighted by audience data Nielsen released Tuesday for the official Web site of FIFA, the governing body for professional soccer. Visitors from the U.S. were second only to those in Brazil in average time spent on the site in June, at 21 minutes, 41 seconds, among 10 major countries.

"The U.S. outperformed expectations in the World Cup and the FIFA site had a highly engaged core of US consumers who averaged more time on the site than fans in more traditionally soccer-mad nations such as England, Germany, Spain and France," said Alex Burmaster, vice president of communications at Nielsen's online division, in a statement.

But when it came to the percentage of each country's population going to FIFA.com, the U.S. had the second-lowest proportion after Japan, at 2.8%, indicating World Cup action had a small but highly devoted fan base here.

On Monday, Nielsen said Spain's 1-0 defeat of the Netherlands in the World Cup final on Sunday was the most-viewed soccer game ever in U.S. television history. It drew a combined audience of 24.3 million on ABC and Univision. And who knows how much bigger it could've been without the vuvuzelas.