Cricket fans hooked to websites for live WC updates

The biggest tournament of cricket caused a surge in visitation to cricket websites in the country as fans glued to internet for latest updates, reveals a new study.

ComScore, a digital marketing intelligence platform, noted that the sites reached their highest volume of traffic for the month during the week ended March 13.

"The Internet continues to play an increasingly important role in sports tournaments across the globe as fans turn to the web for real-time updates, results and live-streaming of matches," said Joe Nguyen, comScore vice president for Southeast Asia.

"We expect to see even greater visitation to cricket-related sites with the upcoming rivalry match between India and Pakistan on March 30, which is sure to be followed with great interest in both countries," added Nguyen in a statement through Asianet.

Among India's online population, 16.4 per cent visited ESPN's cricket site, ESPNCricInfo.com, and 13.4 per cent of web users visited Yahoo! Cricket, it said.

The study further revealed that nearly 7 million people frequented ESPNCricInfo.com during the week ended March 13, an increase of 42 percent from the week ending February 20 when the tournament commenced.

For the same week, Yahoo! Cricket reached 5.7 million visitors, and CricBuzz.com surpassed 1 million visitors