NCAA Basketball site gets 8 mln unique visitors in one day

On Thursday, March 16th, 2006, nearly 8 mln visitors accessed NCAA Men's College Basketball content at the leading sports sites, representing 7.2% of all US Internet users on Thursday and 6.3% on Friday, March 17, 2006. Work locations contributed 4.5 mln of these visitors, which means that 8.4% of all US Internet users at work viewed NCAA content. Friday unfolded in a similar fashion, with a higher percentage of the work users than the general online population accessing NCAA content (7.3% and 6.3%, respectively). The total numbers of visitors to NCAA content declined slightly from Thursday (8.0 mln) to Friday (7.0 mln), while approximately 600,000 fewer visitors accessed NCAA content from work locations (4.5 mln on Thursday and 3.9 mln on Friday). In total, 8.1 mln visitors accessed Men's College Basketball related content from work over the course of the first two days, but only 300,000 visitors accessed the content on both days. This lack of overlap in visitation from Thursday to Friday suggests that a substantial majority of online fans have, as their main interest in the tournament, a focus on their favorite team. However, with 8.1 mln unique visitors accessing NCAA content on the first two days of the tourney, that number is 35% higher than the number of visitors to the entire Sports category on an average day (approximately 6.2 mln), clearly showing fans' strong interest in following the tournament, ComScore reports.