And today is the rematch, three days short of one year since the now-famous encounter smashed tennis and online viewership records. Last year, on June 24, John Isner and Nicolas Mahut played a First Round match at Wimbledon. That match lasted 11 hours and five minutes with a total of 183 games. The final score of the fifth and deciding set was Isner 70, Mahut 68. And that’s not even the extraordinary part.

According to Akamai’s Net Usage Index, the match helped create the single highest news day based on total page views per minute, ever. At noon on June 24, 2010, Akamai registered 10,357,646 page views per minute. The day had nearly four million more views per minute than the second highest record day.

How did that match help to generate such a massive spike in online traffic?

The match was long. Three days long. And over that span of three days, there was ample opportunity for news of the stringed-slugfest to spread via word of mouth and social networks.

The Soccer World Cup – the world’s most vehemently-consumed sports media event – was on at the time. There were already a lot of people with a particular, penchant for competitive sports online.

North America was at work as the match was ending. I don’t need to tell you that people surf the net with much greater enthusiasm at work than they do at home, do I?

Having continued for some eight hours, the final set – and thus the match – could have ended at any moment. Result? What we have here is a whole lot of “page refresh”.

The rematch today probably won’t live up to those expectations, athletic or otherwise. Nevertheless, as the worlds of the internet and multinational media broadcasting continue to flirt, you can bet that they’ll find moments of pure confluence at some of Wimbledon’s more nerve wracking games this year.

[Source : Mashable]

Isner takes on Mahut on Court Number Three at noon today.