SAN FRANCISCO - World Cup fever trumped the obsession with online auction bidding as eBay Inc., the world's largest Web auction company, disclosed on Wednesday how traffic to its site fell each time a soccer game started.

Chief Executive Meg Whitman told investors during a conference call held to discuss the Silicon Valley company's quarterly results that eBay had managed to meet Wall Street financial expectations despite the phenomenal pause in sales.

"The first ball (that) was kicked, site activity declined; it stayed low through the whole game and then popped right back up again and we saw this time after time again," Whitman said of matches in the month-long tournament that began June 9.

"I wouldn't say it was a huge factor in our Q2 (second quarter) results, but it was just remarkable," she said, adding: "When the World Cup game started, you could actually see the site activity decline pretty dramatically."

The plunges in auction activity, monitored by technicians in eBay's network operations center, were felt most prominently in Germany, eBay's second-largest market after the United States, and across Europe and Asia.

On Wednesday, San Jose, California-based eBay said that second-quarter revenue grew 30 percent to $1.41 billion. The number of registered users on eBay grew to 203 million at the end of June, up 10 million from three months earlier.

The world's most popular sporting event, held in 12 German cites and pitting 32 national sides versus one another, culminated in Italy's overtime penalty shoot-out win against France on July 9.

    Report sourced from www.ciol.com