Internet company Indiatimes* claims that the online viewership of IPL 4 has increased by 62% compared to last year, during the first week of the league, saying that the combined page-views for ipl.indiatimes.com; compared to 5.5 million pages last year, when the matches were streamed only on YouTube, Indiatimes' YouTube channel touched 8.8 million. The company shared Google Analytics data with MediaNama, ratifying the claim. The page views peaked on 12th April when matches between Rajasthan Royals and Delhi Dare Devils, and Royal Challengers Bangalore and Mumbai Indians were played, touching 1.65 million page views and 0.6 million unique visitors. However, an Indiatimes spokesperson declined to disclose the traffic split between Indiatimes and IPL's YouTube channel. The spokesperson also declined to comment on the percentage of viewers who viewed the stream for the entire duration of a match, saying that Internet analytics do not work like television rating systems which are based on sampling and that it would be difficult to estimate it. He said that there wasn't not much difference in traffic between night matches and day matches, although, concurrent data usage peaks at the starting of each match. Given that Indiatimes is selling 2100 seconds of advertising across YouTube and Indiatimes, this would be an important metric for understanding how many users actually view each advertisement, and what time of the match is ideal for placing ads, especially if concurrent usage peaks at the beginning of the game. The spokesperson did say that, on an average, each user…
