The World Cup is proving a big hit with surfers, as the official website clocks up a record number of page views.

Day eight of the football championships, when England defeated Argentina, saw a staggering 106 million clicks on Fifaworldcup.com.

This is a new milestone in internet coverage of sporting events, making the Fifa site the most successful sports event website ever, with 464 million page views since the beginning of the tournament.

The previous record for sports websites was held by the Salt Lake City Olympic Games website, with 350 million page views over the course of the games.

English-speaking success

Fans of England, Ireland and the USA - all teams that have done better than expected in the World Cup - seem particularly keen to follow the progress of their heroes.

We knew the World Cup would be a busy time for us but the response has been fantastic

Pete Clifton, BBC News Online

Half of all page views come from the English-speaking section of the Fifa site.

Unsurprisingly, Japanese is in second place as the host country shows its enthusiastic interest in the World Cup.

One of the most popular sections of the website is the football memorabilia online auction site for Unicef.

The first auction, for an Italian team jersey signed by all the team, reached �1,900.

It is not just the official website that is benefiting from World Cup fever.

Record-breaking

On 6 June, BBC Sport Online registered 16 million page impressions, an all-time daily record for the site.

In the first week of the tournament, the site chalked up 70.8 million page impressions.

"We knew the World Cup would be a busy time for us but the response has been fantastic," commented BBC News Online editor Pete Clifton.

"We more than tripled our serving capacity for the event and thank goodness we did," he added.

The two most popular pages on the BBC's World Cup site have been a desktop scorecard with live scores and the live text commentary pages.

It has not just been the progress of the England and Ireland teams that have prompted interest from surfers.

"It is heartening to see big peaks in traffic on other days, for instance, when the USA beat Portugal," said Mr Clifton.

"We went out of our way to make the World Cup site a genuinely global proposition and not just obsessed by England, so it's excellent to see so many users coming to us from around the world."