March Madness Comes to the iPad, for Free

College basketball’s annual tournament is the most Web-friendly mega-event in sports. And now it’s embracing mobile, too. (Unless you’re using an Android phone or tablet.)

NCAA March Madness Brings in More Viewers Online

The NCAA basketball tournament, with its array of games played at conflicting times during the workday, has long been discussed as an ideal sporting event for online coverage. And based on numbers out today from CBSSports.com, more people are indeed watching games on streaming video this year.

CBS Releases Online March Madness Stats

The NCAA basketball tournament is over, but CBS Sports is basking in the glow of its March Madness-related traffic surge. CBSSports.com reports that its March Madness on Demand video player had about 7.5 million unique visitors by the end of the tournament, a 58 percent increase from 4.8 million users over the same period last year. The first four days of the tournament saw more unique visits–5.6 million–than last year’s total traffic.

The NCAA Blows the Whistle on Twitter’s “March Tweetness”

Last week, AT&T and Federated Media debuted “March Tweetness,” a Twitter-endorsed page geared around the March Madness college basketball tournament. It was Twitter’s second attempt at what amounted to an advertising play, and I thought it looked modestly promising. And now it’s gone. At least temporarily. The problem? No one checked with the NCAA, which keeps a tight grip on any and all college sports trademarks.
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Another Twitter Ad: AT&T Sponsors “March Tweetness”

Earlier this week, Twitter started rolling out its first ad experiment–an “ExecTweet” page, sponsored by Microsoft. Here’s the next one–a “March Tweetness” page, sponsored by AT&T.
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Weekend Update, 3.21.09–March Madness Edition

Technically, the term refers to the frenzied flow of games and the intensity of the contenders for the NCAA Championship crown. But the NCAA doesn’t have a corner on “March Madness”–those descriptors work well in other instances, too. To wit:
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CBS Says No One’s Getting Anything Done at Work: March Madness Web Traffic Up 56 Percent

I’ve only watched a couple minutes of March Madness so far, and I haven’t watched a second on my laptop. But apparently I’m in the minority: CBS, which is streaming the entire college basketball tournament for free on the Web, says traffic to its video player is up 56 percent compared to last year.
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Hackers Target Basketball Fans With March Madness Malware

Basketball fans, beware. Hackers are taking advantage of bracket-related Web surfing and initiating some madness of their own, with tactics as sneaky as spreading malicious software through March Madness blog posts. Online security company Websense discovered two March Madness-related malware scams earlier this week, one in the form of URLs posted in blog comments that took users to a phony antivirus scanning site, and another as a search-engine-optimization scam that infected basketball-related terms and pushed them to the top in Google.

Hoops to Go: CBS Streaming March Madness to iPhone

Absolutely nuts about college basketball, but afraid you won’t find yourself in front of a TV or a computer when March Madness rolls around? Grab your iPhone and five bucks, and you’re in business.
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CBS: No Web Ad Recession for March Madness

Here’s a pleasant, rare bit of media news sunshine: CBS says advertisers are still lining up to get into its March Madness Webcast. The company expects to generate $30 million in Web ads from the college tournament this year, up 30 percent from 2008.
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