Cricinfo began as a chat-room bot for homesick fans in America
In 1993, cricket lovers living in countries like the United States could barely find a scorecard. A British researcher, Simon King, built a bot that shared scores over internet chat channels, with volunteers typing in results and summaries. That makeshift service grew into Cricinfo, now the sport's best-known website and statistics archive.
CricInfo launched on 15 March 1993, before the World Wide Web was widespread, running on Internet Relay Chat, Usenet newsgroups and mailing lists. It later moved to a Gopher server at the University of Minnesota and then onto the web, registering its domain in 1995. Volunteers also typed up scorecards of historical matches, the seed of StatsGuru, a database of players and games stretching back to the eighteenth century, originally built by Travis Basevi.
Recognition came fast. Cricinfo was the official source of live scores for the 1996 World Cup, became a UK company in 1997 with King and Badri Seshadri as its first directors, and offered one of the earliest online streams of cricket matches. Early funding came from volunteers and the International Cricket Council before advertising took over.
Then came the dotcom rollercoaster. In 2000 Satyam Infoway paid $37 million for a quarter of the company, which was valued at around $150 million, and Cricinfo sponsored the Women's World Cup. The crash hit the following year, even as the site passed a billion page views. By 2003 the Wisden Group bought a two-thirds stake for an estimated $3 million, merging its own online operation into the site.
ESPN acquired Cricinfo in 2007 and renamed it ESPNcricinfo, launching annual awards for international players. Ownership shifted again in November 2024, when the site joined JioStar, a venture combining Disney's Indian business with Reliance Industries. In June 2026 it dropped the ESPN branding and went back to plain Cricinfo. Its ball-by-ball live blogs remain its best-loved feature, alongside columns such as 'Ask Steven', where Steven Lynch answers readers' cricket questions every Tuesday.
Source: Cricinfo
