Women's World Cup creates record breaking global reach

The Women’s World Cup this year was a massive hit in terms of quality and popularity. Mithali Raj and her gang of women scripted a fairytale by reaching the finals against all the odds but that wasn’t all. More than 180 million people around the world are estimated to have watched this year’s ICC Women’s World Cup and there was an almost 300% increase in viewing hours in comparison to the last edition four years back.

Staggering numbers

The numbers are impressive especially in South Africa and India. It’s almost five times surge in India and eight times in South Africa. The ICC’s decision to make sure that each and every match was available to watch either on television or live streaming, turned out to be a good decision. The numbers are staggering, there were 100 million video views across ICC digital platforms and social media channels with one billion impressions and 67 million unique users on Facebook via posts on ICC’s official pages.

On the microblogging site Twitter, the hashtag #WWC17 was the most tweeted hashtag for women’s sport in 2017 with one million tweets, which is a 24-time increase over the 2013 edition. There were around 50,000 articles in print and online across more than 100 countries for the four week period of the event. India leading the list with close to 16,000 articles, the United Kingdom second at 14,000 and Australia third with close to 9,000 articles.

Competitive cricket

ICC Chief Executive David Richardson said: “We are absolutely delighted with the impact the Women’s World Cup has had. Instinctively we felt that the time was right to invest in women’s cricket and take it to the widest possible audience to accelerate the growth of the game and these numbers have confirmed that.

“We congratulate all eight teams for providing the entertainment, the cricket was competitive and compelling and when you have that it makes it much easier to attract an audience. The sport must now work collectively to maintain interest and continue to drive growth.”