FanSection Blog

The success of CBSSports.com’s live streaming of every NCAA Tournament game has been well documented.  They released their final tally and the results are impressive:

• 8.6 million total hours of video streaming - 75% increase over 2008
• 7.52 million visitors - 58% increase over 2008
• 2.8 million clicks of the BOSS button

The surge in online traffic is certainly not exclusive to CBSSports.  At FanSection, we saw dramatic growth for the 2009 Bracket Challenge compared to the 2008 version:

• 1.67 million monthly active users - 357% increase over 2008
• 1.1 million brackets completed - over 300% increase over 2008
• 597K pools created
• 7.3 million invitations sent
• 211K wall posts
• 14K discussion posts
• Over $50,000 in merchandise sold
• Over $40,000 in tickets sold

And to top it all off, we were far and away the largest bracket application on Facebook - soundly beating the larger sports brands (CBSSports and Sports Illustrated).

There are a variety of reasons to explain the growth in the FanSection Bracket Challenge application:

1. Facebook more than doubled in size
2. We started with a base of almost 200K users as opposed to 0 users last year
3. We leveraged our existing sports community comprised of almost 20 million fans
4. We leveraged the Facebook “post to profile” feature which allowed users to post their pool to their profiles, thereby enticing friends to join
5. Facebook temporarily increased our invitation allotment from 16 to 150 for the 5 days leading up to the tournament
6. March Madness in general is a cultural phenomenon in the US that drives engagement throughout the entire population regardless of sports interests or team affiliation
7. We gave away some sweet prizes: $1000 in team merchandise to bracket winners and $1000 in prizes in a random drawing to pool creators

In short, we did a lot of things right this year and were helped out by the growth of Facebook and the interest in March Madness in general.  At the same time, we have a list of product features that we’ll implement next year to enhance the user experience and drive even more fan engagement.  With base of 1.6 million installed users, we’re already excited about the 2010 tournament.