For those who thought that marble racing, cherry pit spitting and the Stupid Robot Fighting League represented the future of sports, I regret to inform you that they’ve now each had their respective moments to shine and failed miserably.
The outbreak of COVID-19 has reshaped our lives now and forever, but there’s just no point in hoping that an android with a vacuum cleaner chassis for a body and plastic skateboard deck for a fist can ever captivate in the ways that Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo could.
Still, in the absence of the world’s most popular pastimes, it’s not surprising to see that people have largely tuned out Stephen A. Smith screaming about whether LeBron James’ legacy can ever compare with Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun in favor of trying to connect with friends and family.
You might be shocked to learn this, but in the total absence of sports, interest in sports has dwindled. It’s like how nobody talks about the Tasmanian Tiger anymore, and that's a damn shame.
Traffic for Twitch, TikTok and ESPN. Photo: NY Times
What sticks out immediately — perhaps unsurprisingly — is that mobile usage is either stagnant or down across the board while computer web traffic is spiking. Of course much of this has to do with the fact that people are no longer “on the go” and instead at home with their computers close at hand.
However, you could also argue that there’s simply not enough time in the day for us to increase our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram app usage. We were already giving an obscene amount of time to social media apps, and the coronavirus hasn’t drastically changed that in any way. In some ways this is terrifying in and of itself.
But, according to a recent New York Times article, Facebook computer web traffic is up 27%, Netflix is up 16% and YouTube is up 15.3% (between Jan. 15 and Mar. 24). There’s also been a massive increase in the use of virtual conferencing platforms like Zoom, Nextdoor and Houseparty.
This is in line with recent reports from Comcast (30% spike in peak web traffic) and Verizon (a 20% spike in overall web traffic). What’s more, these companies are reporting a shift in peak times (from 9 in the evening to 7 o’clock), and an increase in peak hours, which would normally last four hours on a weekday evening but now last as long as 10 hours each day.
So what’s everyone doing?
Gaming downloads are up 50% (up to 80% for new releases), while there’s been a 30% increase in streaming and web video consumption. Grocery retailers have experienced an 84.5% spike over the last week, and food delivery websites like Blue Apron and Sun Basket have also experienced massive spikes in usage.
In the last week alone, Doordash.com had 10.6 million visitors, up 7.95%, while Dominos had 7.6 million, up 2.14%. YouTube had 7.8B visitors last week and Netflix had 732.4M.
There’s also been spikes for Webmd.com (“Do I have coronavirus?” searches) and Pornhub. The masturbation station saw a peak increase of 24.4% on March 25 with female traffic up 29.9% and male traffic up 25.9%. The over 35 age group spiked by 28.8% while the 18 to 34 demographic was up 24.4%. Strangely, there were also more than 15 million searches containing “corona” or “Covid.”
IMDb is also experiencing a spike as people scramble to figure out if they should commit their immediate futures to Love, Wedding, Repeat.
What’s everyone not doing?
Jewelry retailers are suffering — a 20.3% dip in online traffic — while airline travel websites are also getting hit (United.com is down 21.2%, Delta.com is down 19.4%). The same goes for accommodation sites (Hotels.com is down 15% and airbnb.com is down 14.8%). There's also been some sharp declines for advertising (18%), construction (19%), manufacturing (16%) and real estate (14%) on the whole.
