Savvy Publishers, Marketers Riding Sudden Qatar Popularity

Seems if you are quick and have some clout or thought about the possibilities a few months in advance, Qatar’s winning of the 2022 World Cup host site could have been a traffic windfall for you too.

As was noted in the previous article, Qatar is the Google trending topic of the day. And the smart publishers over at the Huffington Post were very quick to get articles out about it to ride some of that traffic to their site. With Qatar, Qatar World Cup and Qatar Map three of the top 5 trending topics, the Huffington Post’s launch of a “Qatar MAP: World Cup Host Location, Pronunciation” article shows why they are one of the fast growing sites on the web.

It was a very savvy move, reminiscent of the old wild west days of the web, but done with so much more style and knowledge of how the web works today. The Google result has them in the news for Qatar map that was at the top of the search page results and then listed third for the same page in the regular search results – not bad for an article written within an hour of the news breaking.

TechCrunch not to be outdone has a well ranked article for Qatar World Cup – “Qatar’s World Cup 2022 Win Is A Win For Technology.”

The article almost apologizes for the blatant use of this event for a traffic grab.*

“Well there you go: the 2018 Fifa World Cup will be in Russia and the 2022 Fifa World Cup will be in Qatar. We’re all in agreement in the official CrunchGear chat room this morning: it’s more exciting this way. Would you rather spend your summer holiday on the Baltic Sea coast or in rainy Liverpool? (Nothing against Liverpool, mind.) I, for one, think it’s far more interesting, at least from an international perspective, to host the tournament smack dab in the Middle East than, say, New Jersey. You have to remember: it’s an international game, and Fifa these days is very keen on using the tournament to spread the seeds of soccer (and all that that entails) all over the world. It’s a societal thing as much as anything else.

Oh, right: this is a tech site. Believe it or not, there is a tech story here, specifically as it relates to the Qatar bid,” CrunchGear posted. And then went on to mention the technology behind air conditioning the venues.

The GreenMiles – a blog about all thing eco-friendly green – asked “Can Qatar World Cup Be Green?” to gain a 6 ranking for the query Qatar World Cup.

The local newspaper must be happy they backed the Qatar World Cup bid on September 14 as it got them the 8 spot.

No doubt we’ll see these results will change as other industries jump on this window of opportunity. ClickZ reported a similar trend around the BP Oil Spill.

*Arguably, we’re doing the same, but hey we’re illustrating the idea – and count ourselves as smart publishers too 🙂