Got a mail from a friend breaking this news to me well he was off by a few hours
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anyways thanks dude for the news (and for mentioning in your mail to blog about it hahahahaha
).
The deal is a good deal for Espn but they have not mentioned the price tag that they paid for the site i am guessing it must be somewhere in the 15-20 million $$ dollars if u just consider each visitor to we worth 3$ the deal size would be 21 million $$ since cricinfo claims that they have 7 million visitors hitting the site every month but what makes it useful is the wealth of data that it has collected over the past few years player stats,game stats etc etc
The parent company of cricinfo the wisden group is selling it so that they can conc on their hawk eye technology and market it better for cricket and other sports (I wonder what happened to that other New Zealand company building something similar to hawk eye I remember reading it somewhere).
Hawk Eye is a great technology for cricket fans especially since it provides visual display of info in real time to the suers during the matches and provides a bit of interactivity and fun element to the cricket viewers experience.
Well getting it to other sports now that I am a bit skeptical about I mean cricket, baseball yes but would they also be doing it for kabadi,ko ko, basketball etc cause for the later sports it would makes no sense.
In my opinion I think they sold out a bit early if wisden group had stayed invested in cricinfo for a bit long with now cricket being promoted to more countries they could have been able to get a better deal with more users but I guess they were feeling the heat from other ventures like cricketnext , crictv.com , sixer.tv and rediff sports and now with the renewed focus by biggies like yahoo, aol , microsoft they might come up with their own offerings in this cricket crazy nation of ours to attract peoples attention. So I guess wisden decided to sell out and concentrate on the hawk eye technology before the market gets heated up and they have to start a battle to keep their leader position intact.