The Story of how CricInfo became ESPNCricinfo, got overtaken by Cricbuzz in India and why Hotstar is the real king now!

[Prakat]

Amazingly detailed and well-researched piece on the story of where Indian Cricket fans get their live cricket fix from down the ages!

 

https://the-ken.com/the-nutgraf/two-dropped-catches/

 

There are a lot of stories about cricket, but the story about how cricket media was created for the internet trumps them all.

 

If I asked you to guess the earliest time when people started using the internet to circulate cricket information, what would you guess? Perhaps, mid-90s?

 

It actually began a full decade earlier—in 1986.

 

At the time, forget cricket media, even the internet was in its infancy, and people had to use Usenet newsgroups to discuss cricket. A little later, by the 1992 World Cup, mailing lists were used to circulate scores.

 

Then, a year later, a gentleman named Simon King looked at this, and wondered if Internet Relay Chats (IRC) could be used for this purpose. If you don’t know anything about IRCs, just think of them as the earliest form of instant messaging across the internet. And IRCs, like any messaging platform, also had bots.

 

That’s the fascinating story about how Cricinfo was born.

 

Continue reading here...

https://the-ken.com/the-nutgraf/two-dropped-catches/

 

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Edited November 7, 2020 by Prakat

[Prakat]

Here’s the origin, as recounted on ESPNCricinfo:

It was Simon's genius that he looked at the bot that gave privileges and said that if they improved it, it could do other things also. At this point the group was such that if you joined late, you could only see what was happening from that point onwards and nothing before. The first thing that people asked when they joined was what the score was. Someone would reply with, "It's 140 for 3." And then the next fellow would come and ask the same thing. And if you looked at the transcripts of the group chats, you would see a continuous repetition of "What is the score?" "140 for 3", "What is the score?" "140 for 3."   That's when Simon came up with the idea of a bot to provide the information. It was a query-based thing. It could communicate with you if you put in certain keywords. Simon went by the nickname of "Cool Pom" on IRC, and the bot was under the name Cricinfo. Others helped him certainly - the other programmers who were creating this bot, they were much better at doing the programming, but they had no idea of what to actually do with it.   In every IRC channel you could set a title, like the title of a webpage or what you would call today a status message in Facebook. This was the "topic". When you joined the channel, the topic would flash. The Cricinfo bot would regularly set the topic with the latest scores of all the matches, if someone gave it the information, which anybody could do. A bot called Cricinfo, ESPNCricinfo From this point, Cricinfo grew...and grew. It upgraded itself from a bot to a basic website, all with the intent of distributing scores on the internet. If a live match was on, just go to Cricinfo, refresh, and you’ll get the score. It wasn’t exactly ball-by-ball or instantaneous, but it was the closest thing to it, and it was easily the best out there.   Also, Cricinfo did this at the right time—it was just before the dotcom boom. By February 1999, it had crossed a billion pageviews.   And very soon, investors came calling. By the year 2000, it was valued at $150 million. It got some investments from early internet companies like Satyam Infoway, but it hadn’t figured out a way to convert all those users into a business model.   So it found itself acquired by a company called Wisden. If you haven’t heard of them, Wisden is known for publishing an almanack, or a reference book, which is often referred to as the Bible of cricket. In 2000, Wisden wanted to venture into the internet, and set up a website called Wisden.com.   Unlike Cricinfo, Wisden had a plan to make Wisden.com work. It’s a business model some of us are intimately familiar with—paid subscriptions. Wisden wanted to build a paywall, and expected to find around 30,000 subscribers who’d be willing to pay £25 for an annual subscription.

[Prakat]

Except that didn’t happen, and so Wisden decided to buy Cricinfo, another website which was also struggling to find a business model.   As a product, Cricinfo focused on doing a few things. They continued to double-down to solve the problem that got it this far—the ability to provide accurate, live scores from cricket games all over the world. Now scores would be accompanied by a ball-by-ball commentary—all in text—on the website. After that, Cricinfo went ahead and built a database of every single international and first-class game that was ever played in cricket’s history—which extends to over a century.   Wisden also gave Cricinfo a muscle it didn’t have earlier. It gave it editorial and reporting heft. Slowly, Cricinfo wasn’t just a website that published scores. It employed reporters, journalists, and published cricket reports from across the world.   By 2005, Cricinfo had started making money. And more interestingly, it’s brand started getting stronger. To the point where it was more recognisable than Wisden, a publication that had been around since 1864.   For millions, for over a century, Wisden was cricket.   And now, it was Cricinfo.

The brand's clout was emphasised last month when Wisden Asia magazine was renamed Cricinfo magazine. For 142 years Wisden had been the biggest name in global cricket publishing but now there is an even more powerful brand.   It owes much to India. Sambit Bal, editor of the new magazine, says: "A lot of us had mixed feelings about renaming Wisden Asia because it was a very strong title. But Cricinfo is such a strong brand over here that we have already done better than before, especially on the internet." Cricinfo ups tempo on turning clicks into cash, The Guardian, 2006.

However, by 2007, Wisden was struggling, and Cricinfo found itself with another owner once again.   Except this time, the owner wasn’t just anyone, but the largest sports conglomerate in the world —ESPN.   That’s how Cricinfo became...ESPNCricinfo.

[Prakat]

The other quiet cricket website   While Cricinfo’s popularity climbed and climbed in the late 2000s, another, more unassuming cricket media website called Cricbuzz quietly emerged in 2004.     Very little is known about Cricbuzz’s early years. To the best of my knowledge (and research), Cricbuzz had a similar service—ball-by-ball commentary of major games. It also had some match reports, photos and other stuff. By most accounts, Cricbuzz’s service was passable, but it lacked the zing and the personality of Cricinfo’s commentators, who by this time had figured out how to use social media in their website as well.   Essentially, if a match was on, the place to be was Cricinfo. That’s where all the cool kids, young kids, infact, all the kids were at. Cricbuzz probably had an audience, but it was neither distinctive, nor particularly large.   All that changed in 2014, when Cricbuzz got acquired by Times Internet—one of India’s largest media conglomerates.   A lot of people think this was when the tide really turned against ESPNCricinfo.   A good acquisition...or a bad one?   It’s natural to think that an acquisition by the world’s largest sports conglomerate may automatically be a good thing for a sports website that had loyal users, a compelling product, and a poor business model.   For a while, it was.   For starters, the ESPN acquisition solved the business model problem. ESPN just added ESPNCricinfo into its network of digital properties which it sold to advertisers across premium markets like the United Kingdom, Europe, and the USA. ESPNCricinfo never had to worry about what it had to do to keep the lights on.   But it also led to other problems.   Let me show you what it looked like.   Here’s what the ESPNCricinfo website looked like in 2013, just before Cricbuzz got acquired by Times Internet.

Here’s what it looked like in 2017

For comparison, here’s what ESPN’s website looks like for other sports.   Take the NBA, for basketball.

Or even something as esoteric as...say, Mixed Martial Arts.

Do you see the similarities?

[Prakat]

For ESPN, cricket was just another sport, and Cricinfo was another of their properties. And if the acquisition was complete, ESPNCricinfo had to use a standard template of an ESPN website which was created for sports and adopt it. So ESPNCricinfo had to change, and go from a website that had built itself to serve cricket to a generic, larger template.

 

By the way, this is a good time for a quick Product and UX lesson.

 

Users seldom say good things when a website or an app changes its look and feel. This is mostly because users are humans, and humans are creatures of habit, and like things to be warm and familiar. So when a website changes its user interface, a wave of protests, memes, and anger ripples through the internet… and then, a week later, everyone silently gets used to the new design.

 

This happens all the time. It happened when Facebook made the most important innovation on the internet in the last decade—the News feed. In fact, users were so upset and viewed it as a privacy intrusion to the point that Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to write an open letter personally apologising for it.

 

Today, the news feed is everywhere. Even the app that does your apartment society management has it. We can’t imagine there would even be a better way.

 

What I’m trying to say is—users don’t like change, and we should generally take any kneejerk dissatisfaction to a new user-interface with a pinch of salt.

 

Even with that caveat, ESPNCricinfo’s redesign was reviled by its users.

 

Just do a casual search on Twitter and even to this day, you’ll find users nostalgic about what ESPNCricinfo looked like before it became like a generic ESPN website.

 

In essence, the transition wasn’t a smooth one. Not only did ESPNCricinfo migrate to an ESPN-like website (a mov, by the way, that gave it some benefits like modularity and a dedicated feed from ESPN), it also had to figure out other things it had never done before. Videos, games, etc.

 

While all of this was happening, Cricbuzz, with the wind behind its back from Times Internet, proceeded to disrupt ESPNCricinfo.

 

Usually, disruption happens because the incumbent misses a new technology or because an upstart does something different and radical in an area that the incumbent doesn’t understand very well, and hence doesn’t prioritise.

 

So what did Cricbuzz do to disrupt ESPNCricinfo?

 

Something new?

 

Something different?

 

No.

 

No.

 

It did it by building a better product of something that ESPNCricinfo knew and understood very well—arguably the thing it understood the best.

 

Ball-by-ball commentary.

[Prakat]

A better mousetrap   It’s important to understand the significance of ball-by-ball commentary to a cricket website. Typically, over 90% of the traffic to ESPNCricinfo or Cricbuzz comes from a large horde of users who are interested in the latest score, and care little about the beautifully written 3000-word colourful story about how Virat Kohli changed his backlift to accommodate the bounce at Perth in Australia.   Essentially, Ball by ball commentary gets the eyeballs. If you are a cricket website, that’s where your users funnel in. They come in by the millions on match days and after the game is over, they go away.   And these users have exactly one ask — show me the score, show it to me now, and show it to me as quickly as possible, so I can feel like I’m watching it live.   The story of how Cricbuzz eclipsed ESPNCricinfo is told differently by different people. Some believe that ESPNCricinfo never really took Cricbuzz as a legitimate threat. Others think that ESPNCricinfo got too caught up in the tech quagmire after the acquisition, and that Cricbuzz was simply at the right place at the right time.   After the Times acquisition, Cricbuzz got access to some of the better product and technology folks at Times Internet. Folks who understood how to build large-scale ad-supported media products.   And so, Cricbuzz did two things to the ball-by-ball commentary.   First, it introduced ball-by-ball commentary in Indian regional languages. Hindi. Tamil. Malayalam. This made a big difference, and expanded its reach enormously.   Second, it made sure that its app worked faster and better. Basically, it built a lightweight app that worked in poor data conditions. It built an app for India—the world’s biggest market for cricket.

For good measure, it then went on a major marketing campaign to ensure that everyone knew that Cricbuzz was the fastest app around.   It did a lot of other things after that. It got noted cricket commentator Harsha Bhogle onboard the next year. This ensured that Cricbuzz had a steady stream of video content. By all accounts, the Harsha Bhogle partnership paid enormous dividends for Cricbuzz.   What happened as a result?   Well, here are the Google search trends for the two websites in India.     Notice what happens around 2015-2016.

By 2019, when the cricket world cup was on, Cricbuzz was going places.

CricBuzz, a mobile app for cricket news, was the second most downloaded application in the world during the April to June quarter, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. CricBuzz saw more than 13 million installs, a 15% increase from the same period last year, latest data from Sensor Tower showed. Indians installed CricBuzz the most, at 92%, with Pakistanis at 2.4%, as they followed both the IPL and World Cup cricket matches using the app.   CricBuzz is owned by Times Internet, the digital arm of Times Group, which publishes The Economic Times. “CricBuzz is a great mobile-first product that shines, focusing on doing a few things extremely well to make a large impact. It is a global thought-leader in cricket, with nearly 10X the audience of our nearest competitor, and since the app’s launch in 2017, Indians have searched for ‘CricBuzz’ more than ‘Cricket’ itself,” said Pankaj Chhaparwal, CEO, CricBuzz. CricBuzz: Second most downloaded app in the world, LiveMint

The picture looks much starker if you look at traffic over the last few months on SimilarWeb—from a period with little cricket to the IPL. For reference, the blue line is Cricbuzz and the orange line is Cricinfo.

So what can we take away from this?   Well, two things.   First, the remarkable thing for me is that this is a story about two cricket media companies who got acquired by two media conglomerates, and what happened to them. One way to think about it is that ESPNCricinfo, a beloved, early market leader got disrupted by a smaller player which built a better product.   Well, ESPNCricinfo sees it differently. From ESPN’s standpoint, ESPNCricinfo’s relative scale in India matters little. What matters more to them is the fact that ESPNCricinfo is still the market leader in premium markets like Europe, Middle East, and Australia. You know, where ad-rates are vastly more expensive. And if ESPNCricinfo is lagging behind in India, and if its users hate its new website...who cares?   You may think that ESPNCricinfo lost.   But did it, really?   Which brings me to the second thing.   Remember Cricbuzz’s soaring numbers? Remember how it did 13 million installs in a quarter last year during the World Cup?   Well, guess who did half of that in just six days this year.

Subscription-based video-on-demand streaming platform Disney+Hotstar has been ruling Google Play Store’s chart since Indian Premier League 2020 began on September 19, data from intelligence platform Sensor Tower shows. Disney+Hotstar was leading the Play Store’s top chart between September 19 to September 25 with the app recording a surge in downloads when the tournament began and was downloaded over 6 million times in five days, between September 19 to September 23.   Disney+Hotstar is the exclusive digital streaming partner of IPL. Its operating entity Star Network had also acquired the official rights to broadcast IPL for television. Notably, Disney+Hotstar has registered around 13 million installs in the last 30 days out of which 6 million or 45% installs came in just five days. Disney+Hotstar records 6 Mn installs in first 5 days of IPL; rules Play Store’s top chart, Entrackr

Think about it for a moment. Cricbuzz has worked really hard to capture the Indian market.   It has eclipsed ESPNCricinfo, and its base is primarily in India.   But why would anyone want to visit a ball-by-ball commentary website in India, when they can just...watch the game ball-by-ball?   So who is really in a better position?   ESPNCricinfo or Cricbuzz?

[Real McCoy]

Nice post @Prakat I believe what also swung India's population from cricinfo to cricbuzz is the 2019 pulwama attacks and the outrage which resulted in cricbuzz not covering pak matches while cricinfo continued to. Maybe cribuzz thought the indian audience first because of its business model but it surely worked for me. I know it wont last but I followed cricbuzz for the entire year following the attacks and I would guess other Indians did too.

[rahulrulezz]

3 hours ago, Real McCoy said:

Nice post @Prakat I believe what also swung India's population from cricinfo to cricbuzz is the 2019 pulwama attacks and the outrage which resulted in cricbuzz not covering pak matches while cricinfo continued to. Maybe cribuzz thought the indian audience first because of its business model but it surely worked for me. I know it wont last but I followed cricbuzz for the entire year following the attacks and I would guess other Indians did too.

Same reason I removed the cricinfo ap

[Sandeep99]

Cricinfo is still the best to dig up stats..  Statsguru is the best and there is no competition to it. For test matches,  I still prefer cricinfo as they really make it very engaging and exciting. 

 

However for quick scores and all other purposes,  cricbuzz is the best. The commentary is also on par with cricinfo these days. Maybe they can enable more comments from users like cricinfo. 

[Vilander]

I watch cricinfo for stats and cricbuzz for content. Cricinfo had lots of career journalists like sharada ugra who could write a particular type of obituary articles but unfit for sports writing  and cricinfo also had a clear anti bacci bias that often appeared anti India so I started avoiding it. I can tell many folks here around the time felt the same, not sure if we are representative enough but thats the scenario that played out for cricino.

[Cricketics]

Honestly miss the old cricinfo, used to browse it in highschool days. Every Indian’s favorite cricket site if you lived overseas then. Doubt it had that much traffic from India too back then because the website back then did not focus much about articles or videos etc or anything else other than cricket match live scores only which was solely benefical for us folks who had travelled to study abroad and had no way to watch of see scores. 
 

Great memories especially when my link would start buffering, I would turn to their text commentary hoping no Indian wicket will fall untill my stream is back 
 

@Laaloo they were also one of the first few sites to send us a copyright email at fs4u for streaming some series which they had partnered Willow tv with then to stream on willow.