Why Cricket Fans Now Want Participation, Not Just Scores
CREX turned cricket's second-screen habit into scale: 125M+ downloads and 22-24 minutes of daily engagement. Here's the psychology behind it.
Cricket fans now watch with one eye on the match and the other on a phone. The TV still pulls the room together, but the second screen carries polls, memes, score debates and endless opinions. For CREX, that behaviour is not a side effect of modern viewing. It is the core business.
CREX began in 2017 as a hostel-room project by founder Purushotam Rawat, then a student at NIT Patna. The app launched on Google Play around the 2018 IPL season as a live-scoring tool run by a small operations and development team. By 2022, when Shakir Jamil joined as growth and strategy manager, the cricket information market already had established players such as Cricbuzz and Cricinfo, so differentiation had to come from somewhere other than score speed.
From scores to participation
The team realised that fantasy sports had already shown the way: many fans wanted deeper involvement with cricket, but not everyone wanted to spend money on fantasy contests. “We understood that people want to do more with the sport,” Jamil told Afaqs. “Not just follow it in terms of getting information. They want to be involved in the game.”
That led CREX to add polls, quizzes, discussions, social features and creator-led content around the scorecard. It works with cricket personalities such as Akash Chopra, and has partnered with Harmanpreet Kaur for three consecutive years. The platform is designed so that a score update becomes the start of an interaction, not the end of a visit.
Engagement as the real moat
The numbers show why this matters. CREX claims more than 125 million downloads across platforms and monthly active users between 25 million and 35 million depending on the cricket calendar. It recorded more than 10 million daily active users during this year’s IPL final, and estimates that more than 50 million fans interacted with the platform during IPL 2026. One franchise-themed quiz partnership with Delhi Capitals attracted more than 700,000 users.
Time spent is the sharper signal. CREX says average daily use is around 22-24 minutes per user, while Jamil puts competing platforms at about 10-12 minutes. That difference turns engagement into an advertising proposition.
What brands can learn
The useful frame is what we might call the participation ladder. Information is the first rung: fans check a score. Involvement is the second: they vote in a poll or answer a quiz. Identity is the third: they follow creators, back a franchise and join a community. CREX’s move has been to climb that ladder, and its brand partnerships follow the same logic.
- Treat the second screen as a fan ritual, not just an extra placement.
- Build interactive experiences that fit the natural pauses and debates in a match.
- Measure daily time spent and repeat participation, not only reach.
CREX’s advertising experiments include FanCode streaming passes inside the app, branded quizzes, splash-screen takeovers and custom engagement moments. The argument to marketers is simple: if fans are already checking, debating and following while the game is on, brands should join those moments rather than only buying visibility around the broadcast.
Subscription revenue is still just 2-3% of the business, and the company is deliberately holding back. The strategy is to build enough premium value before asking users to pay. In the same way, brands should earn attention in the second screen with utility or conversation before pushing a sales message.
Source: Afaqs!
