Leading cricket portal Cricinfo has been acquired by ESPN.
The site is considered by many to be the online bible for cricket. Although not popular in North America, Cricket has an audience in the billions with fanatical support across the former British Empire.
The purchase by ESPN is said to be part of the push by the cable sports network to broaden its appeal outside of the United States.
Cricinfo is one of the oldest online sport portals, first launching in 1993. The site now has in excess of 7 million unique visitors per month and is ranked in the top 300 sites online according to Alexa.
Cricinfo was a pioneer in developing online sport related services, from living blogging test matches through to extensive user friendly and searchable databases of players.
The acquisition price was not disclosed.
(via The Age)
This is a good news. Cricinfo has been a great resource for cricket lovers. And now, we can expect ESPN to bring some great changes to it.
Launching in 1993 makes it one of the oldest sites on the Web – Yahoo did not launch until 1994 – and Whitehouse.gov did not launch until 92 or 93
It would be intriguing to see a copy of their first homepage – this was the days of the first Mosaic without any images
Search Engine Web, it wasn’t orginally stand alone, it was on a sub domain until the late 90’s but I’ll see if I can track it down.
One day too old:) Nonetheless, glad to see TC catching this on its radar.
cricinfo is one of the first sites I went to upon discovering the Internet. You can read my perspective here: http://www.zaid360.com/?p=191
-Zaid
This is a long time coming. Not only is Cricinfo a great site, it’s become a ’staple diet’ of die-hard cricket fans around the globe. I know many a people who are known to simply break down weeping if they can’t access the site during matches that are not broadcast live on TV. No joke (sadly).
Also, cricinfo was one of the first (if not, the first) major sites to implement content mirroring across the globe (servers in usa, aus, ind, rsa, etc).
Can you believe that porn.com sold for 9 million and this domain less it goes to show you the power of porn still leads the way in online monetization.
#2
The way I always got used to accessign it was by typing www-usa.cricket.org
I think they had many servers around the globe pretty early on(98-99?).
Going back to wayback machine:
1997:
http://web.arch...ww.cricket.org/
1998:
http://web.arch...uk.cricket.org/
2001:
http://web.arch...ww.cricket.org/
What I love about these guys is even in 1999, they were trying to stream live video feeds to us. Of course it was more of a frustration than anything when you mix dialup, real player and the ‘99 era.
-Zaid
I just made a comment that seems to have gotten blocked with compilation of links to wayback machine showing cricket.org’s evolution.
Duncan any way to get it back?
Zaid
fixed, held in moderation due to the number of links.
Just wanted to add:
Long live Anil Kumble
He makes wickets tumble
(rhyming joke for my desi friends)
what surprises me is the domain name, you would think back then they would have been able to get http://www.cricket.com
@ Andrew – they did get cricket.org
I believe it started out as a community and ended up what it is now. Its the best site out there both in terms of information and quality. They track probably each and every player ever played – Amazing. Hope ESPN injects some more cash to carry Cricinfo to the next level
Billions of fans? Tens of millions maybe…
A billion fans is close to the mark . Every animate thing (and some inanimate artifacts as well) in the Indian sub-continent is a committed, crazed, and often emotional cricket fan.
Simon, I take it you’ve never been to India…
the deal appears to be in the $US1 billion range…
One of the most exciting news from yesterday. I remember in 1996 – 1997 there was an india – pakistan match in canada and cricket.org could not manage their servers effectively. Since then they had been growing leaps and bounds with fanbase.
With the ESPN Acquisition, I hope cricinfo will still maintain the simplicity and get more features. I am hoping for espn’s on demand feature to come into cricinfo.
This was a great news yesterday. Its good to see techcrunch reporting on it. I know a lot of people who have set this site (religiously) as their home page. There could be millions of them. The site has a huge huge database of players and their records. Somebody rightly said – Its a bible of cricket. Although it has to do with other bible of cricket- Wisden (which bought circinfo few years back). ESPN as a sports powerhouse can do wonders to cricinfo. But just maintain the look and feel. Its amazingly simple.
ESPN recently acquired Jasyki.com, unknown how much they paid though…
@ NosyJoe – that’s way too much. You must have seen the report about the $1 billion plus that ESPN-Star Sports paid for the ICC Global Rights for 8 years and mixed up figures.
Looks like ESPN is expanding their portfolio
Sorry cricket fans your isp does not subscribe to ESPN premium services. You will no longer be able to view the site.
I guess, ESPN acquiring cricinfo might have its own set of problems. If ESPN does not hold telecast rights for a series, and if Setmax or someone else holds those rights, I doubt if it would cause a legal battle for cricinfo to live blog those scores. Does that mean that there will not be coverage for all the matches in cricinfo from now on?
And I need to correct you on one fact Mike, it’s not just England (British empire as you mentioned) that is fanatic about cricket. Cricket is like a religion in Indian Subcontinent (India, Pakistan and Srilanka). And significant amount of revenue comes from there for ICC or other telecasters. Check this post to get an idea of how passionate people in India are about cricket..
Just to let everybody know:
1) Cricket is the most popular game in India
2) Cricket Starts are like Demi-Gods in India
3) There are two flavours of Cricket Matches very popular:
a) One Day Match
b) Test Match ( Goes for 5 days or at times 3 Days)
4) When there are International Cricket Matches like India/England or India Pakistan, the entire country comes to a stand-still
let’s hope it doesn’t go the same way as soccernet.
The King of Sports Channel made a lot of difference into the gaming cricket in telecasting and picture qualities. Now with this Acquisition, we expect more features in viewing cricket from this website….
Good luck,
Vasu
@dempsey dude that doesn’t even rhyme right…..don’t know what kind of desi friends you have that never told you this…..but kumble is not pronounced as tumble….its more like koomb Lay…..:-)
its interesting that they acquired cricinfo.com even though espnstar.com had a pretty big footprint in the cricket world…..
@Saagar…..its not Mike, its Duncan and he did say former British empire….which includes all the countries you mentioned
CricInfo started life as an IRC bot in 1993, then moved to gopher. I actually helped design the first web home page which went live in 1995. Always worth remembering that there were ways of distributing information prior to the World Wide Web. The site was started by cricket enthusiasts and was almost entirely volunteer run for a number of years, with employees being hired in the late 90s, and then migrating to a mostly professional company in around 2000. It was indeed http://www.cricket.org for a long time, but it’s first home on the web was at OGI – gopher://cricinfo.cse.ogi.edu:7070, then http://cricinfo.cse.ogi.edu
@Nosyjoe, the US$ 1 billion you are referring to is the amount ESPN Star Sports paid to acquire the rights to telecast matches organized by the ICC for 8 yrs, fm 2007 onwards.