The song remains the same at the top of the Video rankings in March: YouTube continues to outpace the market, growing 7.8% while the video viewing sessions across the web grew only 2.3%.

Meanwhile Veoh narrowly maintained its spot in the Top 10, with phenomenal 23.8% monthly growth, edging out CBS Interactive by a very thin margin. The CBS Interactive division includes Sportsline.com, which scored a 154% gain as the prime spot for watching live streaming March Madness games.

Meanwhile Joost, which is backed by CBS, presented the games as a live streaming “experiment.” While Joost works via client, the March Madness offering did not bring much in the way of new visitors to the site to download the player.

Advertisers placed $545 million on TV for the 2008 NCAA Tournament, according to TNS, but just a tiny fraction of that followed online. With 8.5 million consumers watching next-day tournament highlights and interacting with NCAA Basketball content on the web, there was a huge opportunity to reach March Madness fans and perhaps to do it with more efficient media buys.

We used Compete’s BehaviorMatch, which can be customized for any demographic or behavioral segment, to call out the top video sites for March Madness fans.

While Sportsline came out on top in terms of Composition, predictably, some unexpected sports video sites like Runners World and The Golf Channel also scored high. Meanwhile, the largest sites like YouTube and MySpace aggregated the most eyeballs but had the worst Composition scores.

I’m still gloating about winning my March Madness pool – Rock Chalk Jayhawk! Yes, I was glued to the TV during all games… yet, I can’t remember one single ad that aired. It’s sad for marketers really, if I was in fact who they were trying to reach; a college sports enthusiast! Which got me wondering… How much is typically spent on advertising during March Madness?

TV Ad sales projected by TNS were to be around $545 million. “As a sports marketing event, the collegiate basketball tournament is part of a Final Four alongside the Super Bowl and the Summer and Winter Olympics,” said Jon Swallen, SVP of research at TNS Media Intelligence.

And who are the biggest spenders? Well, apparently General Motors has consistently been the top TV advertiser in the tournament, spending an average of $70 million annually during the past five years. So what did GM get for the money?

Using Compete’s Search Analytics Select we created a segment of people called “college sports enthusiasts”. We found that referrals from search engines (MSN, Yahoo!, Google) to Pontiac.com and Chevrolet.com for this segment did increased significantly in March…

Good. The advertising worked… sort of. Increased traffic to Pontiac and Chevrolet doesn’t necessarily mean that it was worth it for GM to spend all those millions - unless of course the quality of the traffic generated was somehow better than before.

Looking at how involved those college sports enthusiasts were on Pontiac and Chevrolet indicates that visitors to both sites were considered more ‘engaged’ in March. Engagement is defined as: use of one of the following tools - Locate a Dealer, Build Your Own, Request a Quote, or Payment Estimator. That being said, conversion, on both Pontiac and Chevrolet’s sites not only reached 13-month highs in March but also outpaced other manufacturers like Dodge, Ford, and Jeep.

What does all of this mean for GM? Well, it seems like the advertising did a good job of attracting people to these two sites. And the quality of the people visiting the sites was better than usual. All’s good, right? Well, for Pontiac at least.

According to Autodata, Pontiac sales were up 6% in March but Chevrolet sales were down 1%. Chevy’s decline was driven by the truck segment, which is being hurt by high gas prices, so there’s more of a story there, but enough for now….

Now that the Final Four is a little more than a fortnight in the past, it is the appropriate time to reflect. No, not on the fact that you finished last in your office pool because you picked Oral Roberts to make it to the second weekend and Duke to still be playing come April (what were you thinking?). It’s time to look at the theoretical phenomenon known as the “Flutie Effect,” which claims a college can improve incoming freshmen quality from success in sports. Are high-profile college sports teams’ performance linked to the level of interest among prospective students?

Tracked here is the visitation to approximately 125 universities’ admissions pages. The percent change from February to March of a given year was observed. The colleges that were followed were all in the NCAA Tournament at least once from 2005-2008. Each bar represents the average percent change for each school who advanced to at least that round in each respective tournament. For example, the “Made Sweet 16” bar in 2007 refers to the mean average of the sixteen teams who advanced that far that year. Here are some significant findings:

2006:

• George Mason’s historic run to the Final Four as an 11-seed made them the no-brainer candidate to benefit from the “Flutie effect.” From February to March 2006, the traffic to George Mason’s admission page jumped a modest 38%.
• Considering how incredible their tournament run was, one might expect a bigger surge, particularly when comparing to other schools who advanced to at least the Sweet 16. For example, five teams who either lost in the Sweet Sixteen or Elite Eight (Duke: 65%, Wichita State: 89%, Washington: 45%, Memphis: 133%, and Villanova: 55%) had a better percentage increase than George Mason. Out of those five, however, only Duke saw a larger total increase in absolute admissions visitor traffic. George Mason’s higher total admissions traffic in February may help explain their lower relative increase (Wichita State and Memphis both had less than a third the total admissions traffic in February), but considering the magnitude of GMU’s run, it was still surprising that they didn’t compare better against those five schools.
• The biggest surprise of the 2006 data was the increase seen by UCLA, who reached the championship game and saw a 140% spike. Unlike Memphis, who jumped 133%, UCLA had a relatively high admissions page traffic in February.

2007:

• This year’s tournament saw significantly lower increases across each level of advancement. This could be due to the fact that the 2007 NCAA Tournament had an unusually low amount of upsets (only 4 teams defeated an opponent who was seeded 2 or more seeds higher than they were).
• For the second straight tournament, UCLA made it to the Final Four and saw a 69% surge in March. Florida, who repeated as national champion, only saw a 13% increase.

2008:

• The major Cinderella this year was the tenth-seeded Davidson, who lost to eventual champion Kansas in the Elite Eight. The popular underdog saw an enormous surge in admissions page traffic of well over 200% in March. It’s important to keep in mind that Davidson’s February traffic was quite small, but the jump it saw in March is still impressive. Davidson’s spike is why the average Elite Eight team’s increase was greater than the average Final Four team’s.
• For the third straight tournament, UCLA reached the Final Four. This year they only increased by 45%, however, its February traffic in 2008 was higher than 2006 and 2007. UCLA’s increase was second to UNC’s 75% among the teams that reached the Final Four.

There definitely appears to be a strong correlation between advancing in the NCAA Tournament and increased traffic to that school’s admissions page. One caveat I would add is that the “Flutie effect” doesn’t necessarily have to occur when a low-profile school emerges. Teams like UNC or UCLA, who have won many national championships in the past, are likely to see their admissions traffic jump considerably. When a school like Davidson this year or Memphis in 2006 comes along, it is simply a more pronounced jump due to the lower traffic levels prior to their success.

For all of the golf enthusiasts out there, particularly in New England, nothing gets the blood pumping like warmer temps, melting snow and green grass. Another “unofficial” season kick-off is upon us as well — The Masters – with first round coverage beginning April 10th. For me and my group of golfing buddies this tournament has always been a great motivator for getting over the winter doldrums.

Also, if you’re like me, you probably spend many weekend afternoons watching live coverage of the weekly PGA events. And as with any of these events you can’t help but be inundated with various television ads or company logos on the apparel, bags and golf balls of the players. Between the PGA tour and the players themselves the public is exposed to literally hundreds of companies throughout a television broadcast. This year The Masters Tournament will have its traditional sponsors — AT&T, IBM and ExxonMobil — but in an effort to expand globally Masters Chairman Billy Payne announced a new group of sponsors designed to help promote the tournament internationally. The top three are ESPN, which will provide live 1st and 2nd round television coverage for two days, as well as Rolex and Mercedes- Benz.

From the list of sponsors the one that struck me the most was Mercedes-Benz, since week after week, television viewers are flooded with Tiger Woods-backed Buick ads. While one might argue Buick is effectively reaching a large sub-segment (over 60) of the golfing world, one cannot deny the influx of a younger generation into the sport. Also, my visits to local golf courses and country clubs lately tell me that golfers are driving luxury brand vehicles rather than “Dad’s old Buick.” That’s not to say Buick is the only automotive sponsor of the PGA - for many years now Cadillac has been at the forefront of the sponsorship stage within the PGA. Through television ads and the sponsorship of one of golf’s favorite players, Fred Couples, Cadillac has carved out its niche in the PGA. But this makes sense to me because Cadillac not only fits within the older generation, but also recent marketing campaigns by Cadillac have focused more on the younger generation of car buyers.

However, if this really is the case, do Cadillac and recently announced sponsor Mercedes-Benz resonate better among golf enthusiasts or does golfing superstar Tiger Woods help Buick lead the pack among the golfing community? In fact, golf enthusiasts are 5 times more likely to visit a Buick website than the average online consumer and 2-3 times more likely to visit a Mercedes or Cadillac site respectively (data gathered using Behavior Match).

This is especially noticeable as we get closer to golf’s largest event – The Master’s — where Buick shows a large spike. So it appears that Buick, while maybe not the brand that fits the stereotypical view of a golfer, has the golfing recipe for success; host two of your own PGA tournaments (The Buick Invitational and the Buick Open) and have the world’s most recognizable sports figure back your brand.

There are more sports television channels than ever, and new sports websites popping up every day, but ESPN is the self-declared “Worldwide Leader in Sports.” So just how accurate is that tagline online?

While consistently being the leader throughout height the baseball and football seasons, it seems that the slow sports months early in the year hit ESPN harder than both Yahoo! Sports and Sports Illustrated, which actually grew significantly despite relatively little sports news in the past two months.

I recently joined FanIQ.com, an interactive sports site that starts the sign-up process with a list of statements which users agree or disagree with. One of the first statements was, “ESPN is biased towards certain teams.” With this being such a prominent question and sites like deadspin.com regularly taking aim at “the worldwide leader,” it seems like there is a rising tide against ESPN.

Although Deadspin is part of the popular media and pop culture Gawker network of blogs, it doesn’t have the marketing power of ESPN or Yahoo! to drive UVs, so engagement may be a more even playing field.

• Deadspin and ESPN have been relatively similar in terms of average stay over the past year, but Yahoo! Sports nearly doubles them both, with an average stay hovering around 8 minutes.
• Even though Deadspin readers may not like ESPN, most still aren’t avoiding it – 53% of Deadspin visitors also visited ESPN in February, while only 34% went to Yahoo! Sports. 26% of users went to both ESPN and Yahoo! Sports.
• ESPN readers come back to the site more regularly, with an average of 10.8 monthly visits per unique visitor over last year, as compared to 4.9 for Yahoo! Sports.

We’ll have to check back in as winter sports playoffs and the baseball season start, but there just might be a new name atop the leader board in online sports.

Did anyone notice their internet connection slowing to a crawl around noon on Thursday? I have to confess that I wasn’t in the office, as I headed to slightly more lively locales to take in the games. Several friends, who weren’t fortunate enough to be able to get out of the office, reported that it was taking an annoyingly long time for pages to load, starting right when the games started.

Attention to ncaasports.com has been virtually non-existent over the past 30 days (and even longer), but with streaming coverage of all the NCAA tournament games, they saw a huge spike on Thursday. And that slight bump on March 16th? That’s when the brackets were announced.

Is the ability to actually watch the games the only reason people visit NCAA Sports in March, instead of other sports news sites?

Although March numbers were down slightly last year from ’06, no other time of the year, not even college football bowl season, comes close to producing the kind of traffic that ncaasports.com sees from the basketball tournament. It looks like fans are just here to watch the games, and that they may prefer other sources for college sports news in general. Maybe it’s time to start thinking about streaming other sports too.