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Eurovision 2012 a success online

28 June 2012 at 14:57 CEST

The domain name Eurovision.tv was registered for the 2002 contest in Tallinn, Estonia. So, this year we could celebrate the website's 10th birthday. And it's been a good year.

The website had 100 million page views this season with 17 million visits. Our videos were seen more than 150 million times which was up by more than 80% compared to a year ago.

We also broadcast tens of national selections and other events as well as all the live shows on our Web TV. This year we had 425,000 viewers combined which is over 40% better than in 2012.

For the Grand Final, we had the most viewers from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, and Spain. In total, we had viewers from 186 countries, including the Holy See (Vatican), the Maldives and Liechtenstein.

Problems during the second Semi-Final

However, we did experience some technical problems this year during the week of the live shows. On the day of the second Semi-Final and lasted till some days after the Grand Final the website was under a cyber attack to make it unavailable for our visitors, a so-called DDoS attack.

Our technical team took swift action and deployed the services of CloudFlare and thanks to their support, Eurovision.tv was running smoothly already on the next day. 

Thus, the website was never fully offline but some users experienced problems accessing it during the second Semi-Final and shortly after. 

"We are very satisfied with the support CloudFlare gave us during this incident and are glad to be part of the CloudFlare network as their Enterprise customer," added Wouter van Vliet, Project Developer Internet at the Eurovision Song Contest.

Trending in social media

Starting from this year, the Eurovision Song Contest is present in six social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, VK, Odnoklassniki as well as our very own EurovisionFamily.tv.

The interest for the contest has boomed the past years in social media and we now have more than a million online fans, which is 2 times (!) more than a year ago.

This also meant that during the weeks of the three shows in May, the contest and its related topics were trending topics all over the web showing the immense interest for Europe's favourite TV show.

Eurovision.tv would like to thank our visitors, fans and of course, our volunteer team for the success of this year. We couldn't have achieved it without being a true Eurovision Family!