by Wade Townsend

All eyes were on Düsseldorf for the Liebherr 2017 World Table Tennis Championships. But exactly how many people were watching as Ma Long and Ding Ning conquered the world?

When it came to sitting down in front of a television set and watching sport the old fashioned way, it’s no surprise that the biggest viewership came from the home of table tennis. The World Championships attracted 219 million viewers on CCTV in China. While the event drew an audience of 50 million people from the rest of the world.

But Düsseldorf was also a digital playground. In total, 4.4 million minutes of table tennis were watched on YouTube. If the number is hard to get your head around, that amounts to 7 years in front of a computer screen.

ITTF’s social media circle continues to grow as fan engagement with the World Championships was in full swing throughout the event.  Over 10.3 million Facebook fans were reached as the action in Germany was brought straight to their news feeds.

Meanwhile table tennis sure knows how to make an impression. The Twitterati were following the results in detail, with 3.3 million impressions on Twitter. And across on Instagram, the platform proved it isn’t just about pictures of brunch and poses on tropical beaches, with coverage of the World Championships making 7.5 million impressions.

And if new media isn’t your thing, then the more than 12,000 articles written about the event had you covered.

Table tennis fans are a force to be reckoned with.