madness

CBS fared better on an ad revenue per person basis for its NCAA basketball tournament delivery online than on TV. So why is Gossip Girl being dragged offline for viewing only on the CW Network, partly owned by CBS?

Sports fans are going online at greater rates to watch games and follow their favorite sports teams, according to a new study by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA).The "Third Annual Sports and Technology Study: Future of Sports Content Consumption," conducted by CEA and the Sports Video Group (SVG), found that 38 percent of sports fans will download and watch a game for free over the next two years, an increase of 10 percent from 2007.

The NCAA men's basketball tournament draws plenty of interest, with Yahoo on hand to help out people who may be away from a television during the games.

CBSSports.com said today that it would no longer require users to register for its NCAA March Madness on Demand video.

Before being split into two companies that essentially represented broadcast and cable, CBS resided under Viacom's corporate umbrella.

The sports wasteland of February has been brushed away as the NCAA men's basketball tournament gets under way. Here are some sites that will have you setting up a bracket and getting back to work without costing your employer $75 billion in productivity losses.

With March Madness having arrived marketers will be vying for the attention of sports fans across multiple channels. Ad spending on the games is estimated to be over a half a billion dollars this year, according to TNS Media Intelligence. All of the March Madness games combined brings in more ad money than the Super Bowl. More than $2.73 billion has been spent on network TV advertising during the tournament this decade. This year's March Madness ad spending will be 70 percent more than it was in 2000.

My friend and occasional sparring partner Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0 has a good post today about the transitory nature of the Digg "flash crowd" phenomenon - the point being, as he puts it, that "not all traffic is created equal."