Eurovision 2022: Live Internet Trends on Cloudflare Radar
The Eurovision Song Contest predates the European Union, with a history stretching back to 1956. For its 66th edition, taking place in Turin, Italy, Cloudflare Radar has launched a dedicated page to track Internet trends tied to the event across all participating countries.
The contest runs across two semi-finals and a grand final. All timings follow Central European Summer Time (CEST), matching the timezone of the majority of the 40 competing nations—rather than Radar's usual UTC reference. The first semi-final takes place today, May 10, at 21:00 CEST, the second on Thursday, May 12, at 21:00 CEST, and the final on Saturday, May 14, at 21:00 CEST. The semi-finals feature 17 and 18 countries respectively, with 25 advancing or directly qualifying for the final.
Traffic and Platform Breakdowns
The main visualization shows aggregate Internet traffic for all 40 participating countries, with a toggle to drill down into any single country's traffic pattern. Hovering over the chart reveals hour-by-hour traffic levels.
Beyond general traffic, the dashboard leverages DNS resolution data to estimate activity across different website categories. A video platform chart tracks engagement with major video services, since Eurovision content is widely distributed across them. All values are normalized against a baseline: the average from the previous week. The same methodology applies to the social media trends chart, which shows hour-by-hour activity across participating countries to reveal any spikes coinciding with the live shows.
Fan Sites and Broadcasters
Eurovision boasts a dedicated fan community, represented by organisations like the General Organisation of Eurovision Fans (OGAE). The page includes a chart for these fan sites. Notably, traffic to them had already hit its highest point since May 1 on the day before the contest began, reaching 6.22x the previous week's average.
The dashboard also charts the impact on national official broadcasters' websites for each participating country. All charts on the page include a download button for saving the data as an image.
Office Favorites
With Portugal competing in tonight's first semi-final, the team at our Lisbon office offered their early picks for 2022. Norway's entry from Subwoolfer, Give That Wolf A Banana, led the favorites, followed by Portugal's MARO with Saudade, Saudade.
Two acts already guaranteed a spot in Saturday's final also earned praise: the UK's Sam Ryder with SPACE MAN, and France's Alvan & Ahez, who perform Fulenn in Breton, the language of France's Brittany region.
Alongside the dedicated page at radar.cloudflare.com/eurovision-2022, Cloudflare Radar will share selected trends this week via its Twitter account. The songs—and the Internet trends—are underway.
