Cricinfo

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The logo of Cricinfo

Cricinfo is the largest cricket-related website and one of the largest websites in the world with more than 20 million users. It includes news and articles, live scorecards, and a comprehensive and queriable database of historical matches and players from the 18th century to the present.

Cricinfo (originally CricInfo) was launched in 1993 by Simon King, a British researcher at the University of Minnesota, and others and grew thanks to the help of 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.

Cricinfo's continued growth made it one of the most attractive sites for investors at the end of the 1990s and in 2000 it received $37 million of Satyam Infoway shares in return for a 25 per cent stake in the company - in 1999 it was valued at around $100 million. It used around $22m worth of the paper to pay off initial investors, but only raised about £6 milllion by selling the remaining stock. While the site continued to go from strength to strength as far as page impressions were concerned, it was in deep debt and was forced to make redundancies.

In 2003 the company was close to closing when it was bought by The John Wisden Group (then owned by Sir Paul Getty) and the company became Wisden Cricinfo. Soon after, the existing wisden.com website was closed and gradually the Wisden brand was also removed from the site.

The Cricinfo front page (on the day Shane Warne reached 700 Test wickets)

It has continued to grow, aided by a sound financial base, and now has offices in London, Bangalore and Australia - with editorial presences in all major Test-playing countries. In 2006 they consolidated their India offices into one single premises, shifting from Mumbai and Chennai to Bangalore.