India Has Sold Five Months of Cricket With the Ratings Switched Off

This is not a sports story. It is the story of a measuring instrument that prices a USD 3.73 billion (INR 32,855 crore) television advertising market — and it has been switched off since 2 July.

This is not a sports story. Not really.

But it sets the price of every second of sport sold on Indian television. And it has been broken since July.

Here is the scale of what that one weekly number prices.

Every rupee in those boxes is traded against a figure BARC produces. Since 2 July, BARC has produced none.

How it was switched off

The reason is purely regulatory. India wrote a better ratings policy, and the agency has not finished qualifying under it.

The new rules are a genuine improvement. A panel growing from 50,000 metered homes to 120,000. A third of the board independent. No more counting viewers who land on a channel by default from a set-top box home screen. Measurement extended to connected televisions.

None of that is wrong. What is strange is that the old system was switched off while the new one is being built, rather than after.

Now, how this reaches sport

Sport is the part of Indian television that depends most on proving an audience. A soap has a history. A Test series has to be sold on what it will draw next month.

Here is what is being traded right now with no audience currency in the market:

Five months of cricket. A home Test series against Australia. No independent number behind any of it. The damage is already measurable, and it is one-sided.

What buyers are actually doing

Nobody has stopped selling television. What has stopped is price discovery.

A senior buyer at a holding agency called it "the equivalent of shutting down the stock exchange's price discovery mechanism." Agencies have fallen back on old BARC data, internal models and relationships. One FMCG marketer named the practical loss: "Normally we shift spends every week based on audience movement." That has stopped.

Akshay Agrawal, who runs linear ad sales at Sony Pictures Networks India, says "historical viewership data continues to be an important reference point." Read plainly: 2027 inventory is priced off ratings from before July.

The exposure is uneven. Bhairav Shanth of ITW Universe notes that "bilaterals are harder to monetise than IPL or ICC right now." Marquee events have demand regardless; it is the weekday bilateral that loses its argument. Rohit Potphode of dentsu cautions against overstating it — advertisers on annual commitments are still committing.

The sharpest line came from Vishal V. Khanna of The Sales Strategist on 13 October: "Selling cricket without BARC is like selling gold without a hallmark."

And when BARC returns it returns under the new rules, so old and new numbers may not be comparable. "When BARC returns, it returns with a new rupee." Every annual deal signed this quarter is written across that break.

And digital is not the answer

Cricket has moved to streaming anyway. But streaming has no currency at all.

There is no Indian equivalent of BARC for digital. Platform numbers are self-reported and nobody audits them. When the ICC announced 65.2 million peak concurrent viewers for March's India–England T20 World Cup semi-final on JioHotstar, the release named no measurement company, no methodology and no verifier. It is a very large number from the company that sold the advertising against it.

Ali Zaidi of Tonic Worldwide: "An API gives you faster access to data. It does not give you independent measurement."

This has happened before, and it ran long

In October 2020, during the TRP manipulation case, BARC paused news ratings. The pause was announced as eight to twelve weeks. It lasted roughly seventeen months — and the case that caused it was eventually withdrawn by the Mumbai Crime Branch for want of legitimate evidence.

A suspension announced as three months became a year and a half, over a prosecution that collapsed.