My first post was just a glimpse of the things you can expect in the pipeline. To begin with I will answer the first question through this post
How has IPL taken over the entertainment industry giving a huge platform for marketing?
The entertainment industry in India is riding high on film industry, primetime television shows, and reality television shows and the news bulletins by the ever growing news channel. But when the IPL season is ‘ON’ these industries better succumb to a simple mantra:
Co-exist or die
We’ll look at the statistics that made me say this for IPL by discussing its impact on the Indian masses through various media ; be it television, newspapers, movie theatres and the latest one that has come up in the list (specially after the Google – IPL tieup, the first initiative ever to livesteam 60 matches in 43 days) is the internet.
We see everyone coordinating with IPL so far like movie theatres (that bore huge losses during first season) buying screening rights to telecast the matches, newspapers and news sites with special IPL pages, internet flooded with blogs, social network discussions and television channels starting up IPL shows for example, the IPL tie up with TV channel Colors worth Rs. 30 crores.
It would be an exciting discussion and to start with I take the last one – internet, that has brought about an exponential yoy growth in the viewership of the game this year.
Well, there were hits by the viewers on sports sites like ESPN’s Cricinfo, Yahoo! Cricket , Rediff Sports ,even our own sport blogs and social networking sites in the last 2 seasons. But with the advent of Google into the picture in the third season its true to say that there is something in the direction, the leader points towards. So, a huge potential for these live scoring sites, social networking sites, ticketing and gaming sites has been revealed. To throw some light on this potential, the statistics of online media recorded say:
- The number of internet users on major sports sites has doubled after the player’s auctions starting from January 2010 as compared to those in January 2009.
- IPL channel on Youtube is the #1 viewed channel in India.The channel views of IPL on Youtube have reached 80,00,000 in the first 5 days with 38 days more to go you can expect a lot.
- On the first day of IPL-3 in terms of channel views IPL saw the number going up 84 per cent to 880,615 by the second half of the day from 478,057 in the first half. By Sunday, it had crossed 3.1 millions.
- Twitter has been stated as the third most popular platform for IPL discussions with KKR [Kolkata Knight Riders] as the most discussed team and Ricky Ponting most discussed player.
There are lot more statistics but let’s digest them slowly. So it is assured that there is some impact created on the online audience. But let me bring you a bigger picture. Just think of five most common things you do when you go online and make a list in your mind whereas I catch you up in the next post.
Or let us make this more interesting, put those 5 things in the comment section of this post!
