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What you will find in this Case Study?
1) About CricBuzz
2) Business Model
3) Growth of the Company
4) Ad Campaign
5) CricBuzz over Social Media
About CricBuzz
Launched on November 1, 2004, CricBuzz the online cricket site is now in the top 5 sports apps globally, behind ESPNScoreCenter and the official apps of FIFA and the NFL. CricBuzz is the largest mobile app for cricket news and scores in India, which was used by over 50 million people with more than 80% of users on their mobile devices during IPL 2014. In January last year, CricBuzz users spent over 2.5 billion minutes on the app, generating 2.6 billion page views.
CricBuzz is the most popular destination for Cricket in India. It gives each and every news and live coverage of international cricket match, World Cup, IPL, and every other domestic tournaments going around the world. CricBuzz runs on a well-managed app for the smart phone other than a fully functional website. Its mobile app for android is the No. 1 Sports App on Google Play. Also it is No. 1 on iOS for cricketing news. Cricbuzz also has presence on various platforms running on different smartphones like Windows, Blackberry and Nokia.
Business Model
CricBuzz sales scores of the match to On-Mobile which has the tie-up with different mobile operators under which users can get latest live score updates for a charge. This is the primary source of their income. Other than this source, the company runs various advertisements over its platform which also gives a source of revenue generation for the company. CricBuzz is in partnership with InMobi for monetization of mobile ads.
Growth of CricBuzz
During the 2015 Cricket World Cup, CricBuzz was the most used cricket source both on web and mobile, which witnessed more than 19 billion minutes spent by the users for cricketing news and updates.
CricBuzz received a massive number of visitors during the world cup which was largest share of visits for the company at a time. CricBuzz has been the dominant cricket destination on mobile, with over 1 billion visits during the World Cup alone.
During the peak of the World Cup season, in March, CricBuzz reached record consumption levels on the web. CricBuzz saw 76 million visits or 36% of all visits in the Cricket category, ahead of Cricinfo at 29% and StarSports at 20%. Users spent 560 million minutes on CricBuzz, 41% of all time spent on Cricket websites.
At the time of cricket world cup, 348 million page views were recorded on CricBuzz, compared to 236 million on ESPNCricinfo and 158 million on StarSports.
Right now, the estimated website traffic for the company is worth $9.9 million. Cricbuzz.com ranks #425 in the world and generates 4.5 Million Page views daily. This traffic data suggests the Advertisers with a Traffic Acquisition Cost (TAC) of $13,567 for daily and $407K for monthly to spend on advertisements with Cricbuzz.com. Cricbuzz.com is most popular in India and its 89% of user comes from searching over Google. The website receives most of its organic referrals traffic from 1,405 websites around the world.
Ad campaigns
Times Internet, which acquired a majority stake in the cricket content platform, has rolled out ‘Cricket Ka Keeda’ campaign. It comprises of three whacky TV campaigns which showcases everyday situations and what happens when the ‘Cricket Ka Keeda’ bites to make them hilarious.
In the Milk ad, a husband smoothly throws a milk packet which lands on his wife’s head while he’s busy surfing the CricBuzz App. In the college ad, one student casually enters the class handing over his towel to the lecturer and goes on to practice bowling techniques in front of him. Similarly there are many ads indicating ‘Cricket Keeda’ in a man.
The company is targeting net savvy, smartphone users, working professionals / students and everyone who loves cricket and likes to be updated on cricket scores, their favorite cricketers, upcoming matches and everything around it. In Aug 2015, CricBuzz sponsored 3 matches India-Sri Lanka test series held in Galle and Colombo.
CricBuzz over Social Media Platform
Social media accounts – Facebook and Twitter have focused on bringing live match updates and sharing the rich content by the editorial team on its portal. The company has witnessed a huge growth in the social media users using its various platforms including Facebook and Twitter the most.
The Facebook page of the company has more than 7.4 million fans while its official Twitter page (@cricbuzz) has a massive follower base of more than 571K. Its Twitter page is full of latest news and comments made by the cricketers all across the world. Many of the posts over Facebook and Twitter remain same where users get the updates according to their platform usage.
With some lesser post over the Google+ platform, CricBuzz is growing over the platform and has reached to a base of more than 395K followers. In addition to the above platform, CricBuzz is also using video marketing. Users can get a small video clip of their favorite players by subscribing to the YouTube channel of CricBuzz. After each match and tournament, CricBuzz posts the selected video post of the match.
CricBuzz has achieved many major milestones during its journey till now and no doubt it has included social media very beautifully in its marketing strategy which made it a huge success in its domain.
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