It’s March Madness time! Basketball fans are rejoicing across the land as businesses weep over the productivity loss while CBS doubles online viewers, brings in the mega advertising bucks and opens up on YouTube!

The official YouTube channel is available at www.youtube.com/cbsncaatourney, and instead of featuring full games, will offer game clips and highlights of matches. The channel is also being sponsored by Pontiac, as CBS takes advantage of the advertising opportunities, with on-site advertising and video advertisements when watching the actual clips themselves.

The CBS and YouTube press release quotes CBS News and Sports president Sean McManus saying that: “This year, CBS Sports and YouTube will expand on the success of March Madness on Demand reaching sports fans everywhere, on all levels across all media, making the fan the real winner as we enter this Tournament."

But the event is not just about watching basketball. Companies complain about the two and a half weeks of game play which soaks up employees productivity, as they try to watch games at work, emboldened by the ‘boss button’ which mutes the sound and replaces the video with a dummy spreadsheet, allowing the worker to look like they’re hard at work when employees are watching the NCAA matches through CBS’s own MMOD (March Madness On Demand) viewer.

Perhaps CBS wants bosses to watch too, just so they can see what the dummy spreadsheet looks like, or at least use that excuse when caught by someone watching the game themselves instead of whatever work they’re supposed to be doing.

The event is also all about the money – big wads of advertising money that helps CBS to offer double the online streams to 300,000 in 2007, and offer those streams to the public free-of-charge – something they did not do when they started streaming the games in 2003 and asked for payment.

According to the Washington Times, the NCAA tournaments bring in US $500 million in commercials and sponsorships, and more TV advertising money “than any other sports championship in America, including the NFL playoffs and Super Bowl”.

According to the same article, “AT&T, Anheuser-Busch and Coca-Cola routinely spend between $10 million and $20 million each year”, while a 30 second commercial is worth US $200,000, which is set to rise to US $1 million for matches by the ‘final four’ teams in the game – with only the Super Bowl able to charge more for advertising.

So, March Madness is a true American sporting institution. Whether you watch games on your TV, listen on radio, read the stats on the Web, watch through CBS Sportsline’s own MMOD player, or on YouTube, the NCAA Men’s Basketball games let everyone go a little mad in March – and that’s just the way everyone – except companies going mad thanks to employees more interested in the games than working – likes it!
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