Times Internet, who have been quite aggressive on inorganic growth this year have made yet another acquisition – they have acquired cricket news portal CricBuzz for an undisclosed amount . Interestingly, this is Times Internet’s fifth acquisition this year.
They have earlier acquired 4 other startups including CouponDunia, DineOut, Moneysights and MusicFellas. The acquisition was announced officially on Times Internet Facebook page yesterday.
Cricbuzz.com was founded in 2004 by Pankaj Chhaparwal, Piyush Agarwal and Pravin Hegde and have met with moderate success over the years. While not in the same league as Cricinfo.com, they do attract good traffic. As per Similarweb.com, the site attracts close to 5 million visits a month. However, site’s engagement levels seem to be quite high with visitor staying on the site close to 9 minutes per visit.
Cricbuzz’s mobile apps are also quite popular with over 5 million downloads on Android alone. It also has a large user base on iTunes, Windows, Blackberry and Symbian platform as well. In addition, Cricbuzz also has a chrome extension which provides live cricket news and information.
As far as the Cricbuzz acquisition goes, Times Internet will in all probability merge with their own cricket portal GoCricket, which currently attracts close to 2 million visitors a month. With merging of these two sites, Times will be one of the top 3 cricketing sites in India.
Cricbuzz CEO Pankaj Chhaparwal said in regards to the acquisition, “We are thrilled to join Times Internet. Given their leadership in digital, this will be a tremendous boost towards scaling up the user base and offering unparalleled cricket content to Cricbuzz consumers”.
Satyan Gajwani, CEO of Times Internet, said, “We are always looking for great businesses that will scale meaningfully in a mobile-first world. Despite being a startup, Cricbuzz has been a thriving, growing business with significant scale. In combination with the resources of GoCricket, we want to build a great cricket franchise to capitalize on the growing interest in India’s favorite sport across mobile devices.”
So what’s the next acquisition from Times Internet ?
[With inputs from Rajesh N]