FanSection Blog

The North Carolina Tar Heels, the largest college basketball fan community for FanSection, rolled over Michigan State on Monday night 89-72 to win the 2009 National Championship.  Unfortunately for CBS, the blowout made the game the lowest rated final in ever.

Overall, 17.6 million viewers tuned in and the broadcast achieved a 10.8 household rating - a decrease of 11% over last year’s game between Kansas and Memphis.  For the entire tournament, the news was much better for CBS.  Game broadcasts averaged 8.9 million users - an increase of 2% over last year’s all time lows. However, the male 18-34 demographics saw a drop of 14%, which has to be very concerning to CBS since that’s a core demographic for the tournament.

So what gives with the NCAA tournament?  As someone that works in the online world, I would like to say that more viewers are watching games online, but that’s not the case.  Another explanation could be the number of blowouts this year.  It seems as if a large percentage of the Sweet 16 games and beyond were over at halftime.  That makes a lot of viewers move on to something better which is bad news for CBS.  The Final Four was no different as the only good game was Michigan State-UConn, and that ended up getting out of hand in the last 5 minutes.  The UNC-Villanova game and of course the UNC-Michigan State game were both over very early in the first half.

I’ll post a complete review of the FanSection 2009 Bracket Challenge application later this week, but so far we couldn’t be happier with the results.  We were by far the largest bracket app on Facebook with over 1.6 million MAUs - almost 5x what we did last year.  And it’s always nice to see a small startup like Watercooler beat two of the largets sports brands in the marketplace in Sports Illustrated and CBSSports.  More details to come on that later.