ISLE of Man TT bosses say there has been a big increase in interest in the races thanks to a growing television and internet audience.
The festival has also increased commercial revenue.
Independent TV monitoring company Kantar Media has analysed this year’s TT TV feed and estimated that the actual global audience is up 45 per cent year-on-year to 23.1 million people, according to information released by the TT press office this week.
The Kantar Sport report estimated that the TT brand itself received coverage to the value of £4,017,180.
In total this year’s TT received more than 400 hours of global television coverage. This was driven by 58 more broadcasts than 2011 – a 23 per cent increase in global coverage – including new broadcasts in China, India, Malaysia and South East Asia and growing viewing figures for the broadcasts.
In the UK, the TT proved to be ITV4’s most popular sport broadcast, reporting an audience of 8,648,000 across the 14 programmes (so if anyone watched all 14 programmes, they’d count as 14 viewers), a 12 per cent increase on the 2011 figures.
The TT website iomtt.com, run by Manx firm Duke Marketing for the government, reported a rise in traffic of more than 11 per cent during the TT fortnight with 1.6 million visits, more than 686,000 of which were first-time visits.
The UK and Isle of Man accounted for the highest proportion, but visits from the USA were up almost 19 per cent while the Australian online audience virtually doubled.
The TT Live! service, which provides live sector times and speeds as well as Radio TT commentary via the internet, was visited 251,000 times during the two weeks.
In addition, more than 88,000 people followed on Facebook and 23,000 followed on Twitter. Videos on the official TT YouTube channel have now been viewed more than 3.3 million times.
For the first time a Brazilian edition of the official TT review has been released. The footage was licensed to producers in Brazil by Duke, which has also concluded licensing deals for the review to again be released in Japan, Italy, Germany and Australia, as well as producing the UK and USA editions itself.
Available across the globe on Blu-ray and DVD formats, the TT review can now also be downloaded from the Apple iTunes store, taking the action-packed programme to a new audience.
The TT’s sponsorship and licensing revenue also grew by 16 per cent while the new ‘remote’ grandstands around the course sold a total of 2,959 tickets, in addition to the 4,493 from the four sold out race days at the Grandstand.
Visitor numbers were also up. The Steam Packet reported that it carried 11,237 motorcycles, 4 per cent more than 2011, while air passenger figures for the TT fortnight saw well over 41,100 passengers using Ronaldsway during the period May 17 up to June 10, an increase of more than 4 per cent for the same TT period in 2011.