Rugby World Cup pull record numbers: England's early victory over New Zealand

English rugby fans wait for the opening ceremony. Photo / Getty Images

Are you in the United Kingdom and Wales following the All Blacks? Whether you are an expat Kiwi living in Europe or doing your OE, or a committed All Blacks fan following Richie McCaw's men around the tournament, how about a shout-out from up north for we deprived souls back here in New Zealand. Send us your fan video footage and fan pics from the RWC back to us. The bigger, brighter and bolder, the better!

The Rugby World Cup is less than a week old but is already smashing all previous records for the tournament.

Whether it's television audiences, ticket sales or even social media numbers. England's RWC 2015 is on another planet compared to previous editions of the event.

Virtually every record from the past has fallen in the first six days of the tournament.

Several, including commercial revenue and ticket sales, were broken before the World Cup even kicked off. More tickets were sold prior to the event than the previous best in France in 2007. That included 89,019 people at the All Blacks-Argentina pool match at Wembley on Monday morning which set a World Cup attendance record.

Ticket sales are still climbing with 2.35?million in total having been bought - 100,000 more than eight years ago.

Corporate hospitality packages have toppled the London Olympics by more than 50 per cent and are on the brink of beating the record set at France 2007.

Commercial revenues are up 60 per cent from New Zealand's 2011 World Cup and rugby bosses say they could top $NZ500?million by the end of the tournament. More than $NZ320?million is from television contracts covering 205 territories, 15 per cent more than four years ago.

While global audience figures are still being analysed, British broadcaster ITV said an average of 3.2?million people have watched the opening eight matches, up from one million at the same stage in 2011 and 2.4?million in 2007. The figure is already identical to the average from the entire 2003 World Cup.

The huge interest is reflected in social media numbers which have surged dramatically.
According to English social media monitoring firm Brandwatch, there have been almost two million Rugby World Cup-related mentions on Twitter since the tournament started, nearly 10 times as many as the 236,000 tweets about the last tournament four years ago. The hashtag #RWC2015 alone has been tweeted 726,600 times.

The data also shows more than a third of those tweeting about the tournament have been women.

The chief executive of World Rugby, Brett Gosper, is thrilled.

"Everywhere you look, it is thumping through records at a vast rate," he told British magazine Inside Sport.

"We always felt it had the potential to be the biggest. I guess we'd be now saying it is. It is probably exceeding expectations in terms of demand and the way the script is playing out.
"Certainly, it's got off to what everyone would agree is the dream start. I think JK Rowling was following the Japanese game and posted on Twitter, 'You couldn't write this'. If she says that, that's a pretty good accolade."