Nielsen//NetRatings reported that daily traffic to sports-related Web sites spiked on the first day of March Madness, the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament, growing 21% to 9.7 mln unique visitors from Wednesday, March 15th to Thursday, March 16th. NCAA-related sports Web sites enjoyed a daily traffic increase of 21%, from March 15th to the 16th, garnering 9.7 mln unique visitors on Thursday as Internet surfers, particularly at work, visited sports sites to stream the live games. CBS Sportsline.com Network sites saw an 84% increase to 3.6 mln unique visitors, followed by AOL Sports, which rose 31% to nearly 1 mln unique visitors. FOX Sports on MSN grew 29% to nearly two mln unique visitors.
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NCAA site traffic in March 2006 |
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| Site | 03/15 | 03/16 | 03/17 | Growth |
| CBS Sportsline.com | 1,958 | 3,603 | 3,135 | 84% |
| AOL Sports | 761 | 999 | 1,006 | 31% |
| FOX Sports on MSN | 1,510 | 1,953 | 2,237 | 29% |
| Yahoo! Sports | 2,121 | 2,601 | 2,377 | 23% |
| SI.com | 724 | 819 | 773 | 13% |
| ESPN | 3,074 | 3,312 | 2,941 | 8% |
| Total | 8,005 | 9,659 | 9,573 | 21% |
| Source: Nielsen//NetRatings | ||||