The last few days have been a whirlwind around Watercooler. March Madness has started with a bang in the FanSection community and the final numbers are in for the 2009 Bracket Challenge:
- Total Monthly Active Users - 1.6 million
- Total brackets completed - 1.3 million
This is much bigger than we ever thought it would be since we topped out at about 350K users last year. The huge growth can likely be attributed to the fact that we had a much larger community of sports fans to target with an upsell this year, but we also can’t ignore the fact that Facebook itself is a much bigger community from which to draw new users. Either way, we couldn’t be happier about the performance of the Bracket Challenge application so far. We’re more than double the size of the two nearest competitors: Sports Illustrated and CBSSports. Not bad for a little start-up in Mountain View, CA.
That’s not to say that it hasn’t been without its challenges. Getting almost 2x the number of users we were planning hasn’t been the easiest thing to deal with from an infrastructure and support perspective. We have a great team here at Watercooler though and so far we’ve managed to keep up. Thursday morning was very interesting though. We’ll likely have another surge on Monday as users come back to see how they’re doing after the first two weekend of the tournament. We’ll be ready.
And checking in on the monetization front, we’ve had pretty good success with merchandise and tickets. From a merchandising standpoint, we’ve sold almost $20K in gear the last few days with big sales expected once the Sweet 16 is set. I’ll post again with follow up info when I have it.
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