ESPN Cricinfo
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Type of site
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Sports website |
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| Available in | English |
| Owner | ESPN Inc. |
| Revenue | US $150 million(2006) |
| Website | ESPNcricinfo |
| Alexa rank |
 313 (January 2017[update]) |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | Optional |
| Launched | March 15, 1993 |
| Current status | Active |
ESPNcricinfo (formerly known as Cricinfo or CricInfo) is a sports news website exclusively for the game of cricket. The site features news, articles, live coverage of cricket matches (including liveblogs and scorecards), and StatsGuru, a database of historical matches and players from the 18th century to the present. As of July 2015[update], Sambit Bal was the editor. The site, originally conceived in a pre-World Wide Web form in 1993 by Dr Simon King, was acquired in 2002 by the Wisden Group—publishers of several notable cricket magazines and the Wisden Cricketers' Almanack. As part of an eventual breakup of the Wisden Group, it was sold to ESPN, jointly owned by The Walt Disney Company and Hearst Corporation, in 2007.
CricInfo was launched on 15 March 1993 by Dr Simon King, a British researcher at the University of Minnesota with help from students and researchers at universities around the world.
While a company, CricInfo Ltd, was formed in 1996, CricInfo remained a volunteer-run operation until late 1999 and was not fully staffed until late 2000. The site was reliant on contributions from fans around the world who spent 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% 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.
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