Times Internet acquires cricket news portal CricBuzz.com

Times of India Group’s digital arm Times Internet has acquired a majority stake in the online cricket site CricBuzz for an undisclosed amount. Cricbuzz and GoCricket, launched by Times Internet earlier this year, will be merged to create the largest cricket news destination, reaching over 50 million monthly users on digital platforms. Starting with live streaming IPL across devices, GoCricket's popularity enhanced further with original content, including an exclusive partnership with Sourav Ganguly.

Times Internet hopes to leverage Cricbuzz's strong loyalty and expertise in the cricket domain, coupled with rich editorial content across text, photos, and videos, to build a great user experience around cricket. 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.

Founded by Pankaj Chhaparwal, Piyush Agrawal and Pravin Hegde, Cricbuzz.com was started as a provider of ball-by-ball commentary for major cricket matches in the world. The portal now live streams various international matches along with commentary, and also develops its own content and with features, write-ups and up-to-date news from around the cricketing world. Times Internet recently acquired Bangalore-based Rupee Street Financial Services Pvt Ltd, the company behind the online personal finance platform Moneysights which was shut down in September 2012. Other recent acquisitions by Times Internet include CouponDunia, DineOut and MusicFellas.