We have recorded across the board declines in investor traffic in the 23 websites we manage.
We had speculated that the World Cup (I have put in a link here to FIFA as they need help on the traffic to their website – its now up from 20,000,000 a minute to 20,000,001 a minute) might increase traffic. How naive we were. There’s another side though. A more interesting one – the long term effects of the enhancement of Africa’s image. I think that African leaders are cursing themselves for not taking their soccer more seriously and realising that an event such as this is the biggest PR event they could possibly ask for.
Consider Ghana. The most deserving African nation of anything good. A decent democracy. A nice people. An expensive airport. They did not deserve the idiocy of soccers rules that saw them out of the World Cup. Barack Obama visited them. Ghana is king in Africa. I love Ghana.
But their online investor relations is way behind the rest of Africa? An opportunity lost? Yes. Definitely.
That said, with only the final to go, traffic to our investor websites is picking up again. We are going to watch the Ghana section of Africanfinancials.com closely to see if soccer helps investment. By the way the Dutch are going to win. Spain were lucky.