ESPNcricinfo - History

History

CricInfo was launched in 1993 by Dr. Simon King, a British researcher at the University of Minnesota with help from students and researchers at universities around the world. It initially operated as a volunteer-based collective, and started life as a simple IRC bot. It was soon made available via Gopher as well, and with the advent of the Mosaic web browser in April 1993 became one of the earliest content web sites on the Internet.

While a company, CricInfo Ltd, was formed in 1996, CricInfo remained essentially a volunteer run operation until late 1999 and was not fully staffed until late 2000. The site was entirely reliant on contributions from avid fans around the world who spent many hours compiling electronic scorecards and contributing them to CricInfo's comprehensive archive, as well as keying in live scores from games around the world using CricInfo's scoring software, "dougie". In 2006, Cricinfo's estimated worth was $150 million.

Cricinfo's significant growth in the 1990s made it an attractive site for investors during the peak of the dotcom boom, and in 2000 it received $37 million worth of Satyam Infoway Ltd. shares in exchange for a 25 per cent stake in the company (a valuation of around £100 million). It used around $22m worth of the paper to pay off initial investors but only raised about £6 million by selling the remaining stock. While the site continued to attract more and more users and operated on a very low cost base, its income was not enough to support a peak staff of 130 in nine countries, forcing redundancies.

By late 2002 the company was making a monthly operating profit and was one of very few independent sports sites to avoid collapse (such as Sports.com and Sportal). However, the business was still servicing a large loan. Cricinfo was eventually acquired by the Paul Getty's Wisden Group, the publisher of the Wisden Cricketers' Almanack and The Wisden Cricketer, and re-named Wisden Cricinfo. The Wisden brand (and its own wisden.com site) were eventually phased out in favor of Cricinfo for Wisden's online operations. In December 2005, Wisden re-launched its recently discontinued Wisden Asia Cricket magazine as Cricinfo Magazine, a magazine dedicated to coverage of Indian cricket. The magazine published its last issue in July 2007.

In 2007, the Wisden Group began to be broken up and sold to other companies; BSkyB acquired The Wisden Cricketer, while Sony Corporation acquired the Hawk-Eye ball tracking system. In June 2007, ESPN Inc. announced that it had acquired Cricinfo from the Wisden Group. The acquisition was intended to help further expand Cricinfo by combining the site with ESPN's other web properties, including ESPN.com and ESPN Soccernet. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

ESPNcricinfo's popularity was further demonstrated on 24 February 2010, when the site could not handle the heavy traffic experienced after notable Indian player Sachin Tendulkar broke the record for the highest individual score in a One Day International match with 200*.