ICC Cricket World Cup 2019: Digital content had 3.5 billion views

Eoin Morgan WC

The International Cricket Council (ICC) on August 7 released the digital content numbers with various platforms delivering cumulative 3.5 billion views with a further 1 billion from digital clips licensees making it one of the most watched global sporting event. The event also saw record numbers on Twitter and Instagram with a number of videos reaching more than 3 million views.

The official ICC YouTube channel saw 2.3 billion minutes of tournament content viewed. Whilst on Facebook, there were over 1.2 billion minutes of content watched, over 10 billion impressions and over 68 million engagements.

ICC Chief Executive Manu Sawhney said:"The growth in consumption along with these record-breaking numbers demonstrate the power of cricket to bring together an enormous global audience as well as the increasing appetite of fans to engage with more than just match day content."

"The ICC's focus on fan engagement, both in terms of deepening existing fan interaction with the sport and bringing new fans to the game has been driven by data and analytics."

The most watched video on ICC's twitter page was one of India captain Virat Kohli requesting Indian fans to show more respect to Australia batsman Steve Smith, an incident captured during a break between overs.

The #CWC19 conversation generated 31 million Tweets from 20th May to 15th July. A comparison of the official hashtag #CWC19 to last time's #CWC15 showed more than a 100% growth in tweet volume.

India-Pakistan matches are a top draw in ICC events and so it was no surprise that the most-tweeted match was their league encounter at Old Trafford, the figure of 2.9 million Tweets making it the biggest ODI ever on Twitter.

The second-most Tweeted match was the final between England and New Zealand with the India-New Zealand semifinal coming in third.

On Social Media, 14 million new followers were added across ICC and CWC channels and over 22,000 pieces of content were posted through the event.

The ICC social media channels garnered 481 million engagements across channels with Instagram providing over 60% of engagements. Three separate posts crossed over 1 million engagements out of which two were hugely popular bespoke picture graphics commissioned by the ICC.

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There were 75 million unique users on the ICC website and app with 272 million page views of the official event website. More than 41 million fantasy teams were created throughout the event on the ICC app.