Scoryboard opens a new window of cricket on web

Launched by Anupam Mukerji, better known as the Fake IPL Player, Scoryboard is all about giving the user all necessary information about a cricket match at one glance.

PitchInvasion New Media, which runs Pitch-Invasion, the online radio show by Anupam Mukerji, better known as the Fake IPL Player, has launched Scoryboard, a tile-based cricket dashboard that gives the user all necessary information about a cricket match at one glance. The interface houses information about an on-going or an upcoming match, players involved in that match and tweets related to that match.

Launched during the IPL season on April 10 and 11, the site claims it received 11,000 visits on the first day, which went up to 124,862 visits on April 15, with 50 per cent unique users. On April 15, Scoryboard claims to have achieved 178,334 page views with an average visitor spending 181 seconds on the website. Mukerji informs that during live matches, especially on weekdays, the traffic surges.

Speaking to afaqs! about the idea behind Scoryboard, Mukerji says that it is the result of an ethnography research into digital cricket content consumption behaviour. The study was done to find out how people are consuming cricket content in the digital space, what they are actually looking for and if there are any unmet needs.

"The findings blew our minds. We realised that people's consumption patterns have changed, the devices they use to access information have changed, attention spans have fallen dramatically, and what constitutes 'important information' related to cricket is not the same. However, the cricket media industry is still following the same rules for content as it did back when print was the primary medium. While every website is trying to get the user to click more and interact more, most users wanted a fairly clean, non-intrusive experience. And that's why Scoryboard has no banners, no unnecessary links being thrown at the user and gives the user a clean, peaceful interface," informs Mukerji.

Scoryboard has been exclusively licensed to IBNLive for the duration of the IPL and both the entities are cross promoting each other on their platforms. IBNLive has given Scoryboard prime real estate on its pages, banners on its home page, and the live cricket page of Cricketnext.com.

Besides IBNLive, Flying Machine is also an exclusive sponsor of Scoryboard during the IPL. "They get branding real estate on the product and the choice to drive user engagement campaigns through Scoryboard. Flying Machine's tagline of 'New Cool' fits very well with Scoryboard, which is a new cool way of following cricket," opines Mukerji.

Speaking about the life of the product after the IPL, Mukerji informs that since cricket has a 12-month calendar these days, the product team has planned a tech and feature upgrades roadmap for Scoryboard. "We'd like to extend Scoryboard to other sports and other verticals. We think there's a lot more verticals that this user interface and information architecture can positively impact," states Mukerji.

Fake IPL Player was a cricket blog started by Anupam Mukerji along with the 2009 edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL). It was last updated in August, 2012. After its huge popularity, in March 2010, Fake IPL Player released a book called 'The Gamechangers' in India, coinciding with the third season of IPL, and loosely based on the contents of his blogs. In 2011, Mukerji started Pitch Invasion, an online radio station that claims to provide live cricket commentary with a twist. In 2012, internet and telecom company MTS signed Mukerji as its brand ambassador and released a TV advertisement.