Record-breaking year for The Cricketer's digital channels

Records were repeatedly broken this summer as The Cricketer's digital offering reached new heights

A bumper summer of cricket added to continued investment in digital journalism has generated extraordinary growth for thecricketer.com in 2019.

Our five-strong team, working under digital editor Sam Morshead, covered the World Cup, the Ashes, the Women's Ashes, county cricket and the Kia Super League in intimate detail over the course of the English summer, establishing the website as a prominent part of the cricket media landscape.

Reporters attended 42 of the 48 World Cup games, every Test match - including the women's Ashes Test against Australia in Taunton, every men's ODI and a large number of matches in the T20 Blast, Royal London One-Day Cup and County Championship.

We take pride in being the fastest-growing cricket news outlet in the UK and, in February, won the coveted ECB Outstanding Coverage of Domestic Cricket award.

Our dedicated portals for the World Cup and Ashes were very well received by readers, and their county equivalents - the County Hub and T20 Blast Hub - are a source of all the latest news and up-to-date information of cricket-mad fans.

Over the summer, The Cricketer formed strong commercial partnerships with Kia, who sponsored our Women's Cricket portal; Cricket 19, who enjoyed a homepage takeover; and Sporting Index, the sponsors of the World Cup portal.

We have formed excellent working links with the majority of the counties as well as the ECB, and in 2019 entered into a rewarding partnership with Multan Sultans in the Pakistan Super League.

All this has contributed to huge growth across all of our channels.

Unique users for the summer (May 1 to September 15), have risen 360% year-on-year and 1,302% up when compared to the equivalent period in 2017. We now lay claim to 250,000 unique users per month regularly.

Page views are up 244% year-on-year and have enjoyed a rise of 1,360% on 2017.

A focus on search engine optimisation means the The Cricketer now ranks above ESPNcricinfo, Cricbuzz and BBC Sport for a large number of high-profile cricket search terms.

As a direct result, we have seen massive increase in traffic referred by organic search - up 800% year-on-year and 2,975% up on summer 2017.

Securing an established place within Google News has also helped open up new avenues for web traffic, and we are looking to replicate that on Apple News and Flipboard.

Referrals from social media have risen 217% year-on-year and 768% on the equivalent timeframe two years ago.

Our Twitter platform has broken the 100,000 follower mark this year - a rise of more than 30,000 in less than two years.

In August we enjoyed more than 20million Twitter impressions, compared to an average of 5million in the summer of 2018.

Our Facebook following has grown steadily, from 213,000 likes in August 2018 to around 540,000 today. We have received an average of 2.6million Facebook impressions per month.

A concerted effort to improve our Instagram following saw our numbers rise from 2,000 in September 2018 to more than 20,000 today.