Facebook is willing to spend $ 600 million on the Indian cricket tournament.
Unlike the rest of the world, in India, cricket is the king sport and of course the Indian Cricket Premier League (IPL) is the most expensive sports league in this market.
IPL was born in 2008 and currently has more than 1 billion global audience, most of which are from India, where cricket is the most popular sport. The tournament has the financial presence of the richest man in India as well as many of the country’s movie stars.
With a hot growing social networking market like India, Facebook needs more “weapons” to compete as well as more quality content to generate revenue, and tournaments like IPL is what Facebook needs. .
The proof is that the company is willing to spend $ 600 million to participate in the copyright auction to broadcast 5 consecutive years from 2018 of this fascinating tournament. IPL will help Facebook attract more users in India, help it grow users’ Facebook usage in this market and promote Facebook Watch, a video streaming segment that Facebook hopes to compete with YouTube. by Google.
The revenue that Facebook targets is the revenue that entices advertisers from traditional TV platforms if it successfully acquires IPL’s copyrights.
However, Facebook’s intentions went bankrupt when Twenty-First Century Fox’s Star India channel won the rights to a record $ 2.55 billion for both traditional and live broadcast copyrights. online.
“Facebook’s bid is still significant because it’s a huge price in a nascent market,” said Pivotal analyst Brian Wieser. “It makes it clear that Facebook intends to be a giant in video broadcasting.”
Failure to Star India certainly does not diminish this ambition of Facebook as the company continues to spend money to buy copyrights to other sports tournaments around the world.