Cricket World Cup fever engulfed brands before the tournament started and it has continued as well. But on the web it has seen the most activity and the volume is set to increase with India v Pakistan in the semi finals.
A study by comScore has revealed huge surge in traffic on cricketing websites during the World Cup. As per the data collected, 16.4 percent of India’s online population visited ESPNcricinfo.com and 13.4 percent visited Yahoo! Cricket during the week ending March 13.
Top Cricket sites see huge surge in traffic
ESPN owned cricinfo.com saw 7 million unique visitors frequenting the website during the week ended March 13. This statistic at the beginning of the tournament was at 4.8 million for the week ending February 20. This means an increase of 42% in four weeks.
Yahoo! Cricket experienced 5.6 million unique visitors during the week ended March 13. While the number for the week ended February 20 was 3.8 million, an increase of 48%.
Thirdly, Cricbuzz.com stood at 1.1 million for the week ended March 13. Four weeks back, it stood at 858,000 unique visitors. The site therefore experienced an increase in visitor base of 37%.
Top matches in India
India v South Africa (March 12) saw 1.4 million visitors visit ESPNCricinfo.com and 1.2 million visitors to Yahoo! Cricket. Less glamorous game between India and Bangladesh (February 19) gathered 1.4 million online users in India to ESPNCricinfo.com and 1.1 million to Yahoo! Cricket. Third most popular game during this period was India v England (February 27) which saw nearly 1.2 million people visit ESPNCricinfo.com and 724,000 visit Yahoo! Cricket.
Streaming is huge too!
India v South Africa also was the biggest online streamed Cricket match ever in India. According to the company behind it – Akmai Technologies, live streaming page on espnstar.com/cwclive saw usage of 43 GBPS (Gigabytes per second) at its peak time. Also, over 3 million streams were delivered to over 1.5 million unique consumers of the match day. Free live streaming section had received 55 million views for the first 42 games. Games involving India had accounted for 10.7 million streams peaking at 3 million for the India v South Africa game.
