• The average household rating for the tournament to date is 5.3%. The number is up a tick from the 5.2% through the same time last year.
• An average of 9.6 million viewers tuned in to the Sweet 16 and Elite 8 games this year – the most average viewership for those games since 2006.
• The most-watched session of the tournament so far was the second round - which featured three hotly contested games – on Sunday, March 22nd at 5pm ET. An average of 11.2 million viewers tuned in to watch Louisville-Siena, Michigan State-USC, or Marquette-Missouri during that time.
• The talk of the blogosphere among the Final Four teams is Michigan State, who has the fortune of playing for a national championship in front of a home crowd in Detroit. The Spartans captured almost 34% of discussion involving any one of the Final Four schools over the last month. UNC captured 26% of the buzz, followed by UCONN  with 22% and Villanova with 19%.

Percent of Blog Buzz for Final Four NCAA Teams, March 1st -March 31st, 2009

• Internet sports sites surged in March as a result of March Madness. The number of unique visitors to sports sites peaked the week of March 22nd – the week leading up and into the Sweet 16 – with 46.5 million people logging on.

Sports Websites – Unique Audience

• According to a Nielsen Sportsquest poll, heavy NCAA Men’s Basketball fans were 131% more likely to have participated in a tournament pool this year than the total U.S. population.
• Sportsquest also found that 7.9% of total respondents said they watched the opening round games at a location other than their home or someone else’s home, with 27% of those respondents saying that they watched the first round of NCAA March Madness games at work. About 38% of those same respondents said they watched these games at a bar or restaurant.

For more information on March Madness trends and insights, please contact Aaron Lewis.