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V. Rishi Kumar

India accounts for 3.75 million visitors to the portal

Hyderabad May 11 The Indian cricket team's World Cup debacle and early exit left many television channels, advertisers and portals heavily impacted. Cricinfo, the interactive cricket portal, has a different story to narrate as to how game lovers in the US, the UK and Sri Lanka have changed its fortunes.

Of the near 20 million plus visitors to its portal, while India still continues to have about 3.75 million visitors (which dipped marginally during the Cup post India's exit), the US was close behind with about 3 million visitors and the UK with 2 million and the Gulf and Far East followed suit. Significantly, new delivery channels such as information updates on mobile phones on subscription basis were a big hit.

According to Mr Ramesh Kumar, Commercial Director of Cricinfo, of its 30 major advertisers only one exited after the Indian team's ouster. And patterns suggest that many of the Indian cricket lovers continued to visit the site following the fortunes of some select teams all through the World Cup.

In fact, in some cases, if the TV viewership was lower when it came to certain cricket matches, it shot up for Cricinfo as game lovers wanted to catch up with the latest updates on PCs or mobile phones during office hours. The mobile phone services offered through telecom carriers too was a big hit, as it provided updates without any disruption to mobile phone users, Mr Ramesh Kumar explained.

The company, which shifted its operations to Bangalore late in 2006, is in parleys with several major telecom carriers in the UK, and the US, to offer new set of services, he said.

"The mobile updates business was launched about two-and-a-half years ago and this coupled with syndication of content with television channels continues to expand in some parts of the world, where cricket is not played. The partnerships with NDTV, IBN and India Times, Sify and Malayala Manorama, continues to expand. Now we are in the process of exploring more vernacular options," he explained.

"We partner with AOL for cricket and the likes of Yahoo! UK and other TV channels and portals and command a market share of over 70 per cent in cricket.

"The loyal followers of cricket stayed with Cricinfo even with India's debacle and now we are looking at India-Bangladesh series and have partnered with AK Tel in Bangladesh and other service providers in Sri Lanka," he explained.

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