More fans engage with women’s cricket as impressive broadcast and digital numbers revealed

The success of the ICC Women’s T20 World Cup 2023 has highlighted the continued upward trajectory of the women’s game across the world, with outstanding engagement numbers across broadcast and digital platforms, increasing yet again for an ICC event.

The ICC Women’s T20 World Cup 2023 was the most watched ICC women’s event to date with global viewing hours for the event reaching 192 million, a 44% increase from the 2020 World Cup in Australia highlighting the continued and growing appetite for women’s cricket in line with the ICC’s strategic priority.

The event has created a long-term legacy for women’s cricket in South Africa, inspiring a new generation of girls and boys to pick up a bat and ball. This was highlighted by the broadcast figures in the host nation, which saw a 130% increase in live coverage, including the final – involving South Africa for the first time in an ICC event, men’s or women’s, which was available on free-to-air television. The overall viewership figures for the event shattered past records with an increase of 790% of fans tuning in to enjoy the World Cup compared to the previous edition in 2020.

There were also impressive increases of engagement in India with total live viewing hours across linear TV and digital platforms up 57% from 2020 despite India not reaching the final, showcasing fans’ demand for women’s cricket in the country. Overall, the most watched game in India was the Women in Blue’s group stage fixture against Pakistan, which received a combined 32.8 million live viewing hours across the Star Sports network and Disney+ Hotstar.

In the United Kingdom, the total live viewing hours of the World Cup was 6.9 million, up 26% from 2020 and 16% from the 2018 event, making it the most watched ICC Women’s T20 World Cup to date.

On ICC’s digital channels there was an uplift of 26% video views across all channels with the ICC Women’s T20 World Cup 2023 achieving 1.39 billion video views compared to 1.1 billion for the 2020 edition in Australia.

Across the ICC website and app, the numbers revealed the highest ever audience for a women’s event with 12.5m unique users across both platforms – 20% higher than the Women’s Cricket World Cup 2022 in New Zealand showing the result of the ICC’s investment in a range of features for the first time for a women’s event including the VR ShotTracker, where fans could see an augmented replay of every six, a vertical video feed including in-game and match highlights from every game and a number of in stadia activations for fans in attendance.

The ICC partnership with Meta produced some exciting content for fans again with the main aim to raise awareness of the event to a younger and broader audience in India. Three Instagram content creators produced non-traditional pieces for ICC’s channels that included a singalong with the entire Indian cricket team, comedy skits involving players (in Hindi) and female empowerment pieces celebrating the participants of the event. The content series generated incredible numbers – more than 344 million video views for only 14 individual Reels.

ICC Chief Executive, Geoff Allardice said: “The ICC Women’s T20 World Cup 2023 broadcast and digital numbers are another example of the excellent progress that is being made to accelerate the growth of women’s cricket. As a strategic priority for the sport we are working hard to engage fans and new audiences with our ICC Women’s events.

“For what was a game-changing event for women’s cricket in South Africa with some exciting and competitive cricket, there was also increased engagement numbers in other key markets in India and the UK which is very pleasing to see. The approach to digital innovation for ICC Women’s events has also seen an uplift in fans engagement with the World Cup and our focus is to continue to provide audiences engaging content throughout the year to fulfill that growing demand.”
BCS Bureau