The March Madness is Spreading

The insanity of sports fans for March Madness can no longer be contained on television, or even on the CBS SportsLine or NCAA Web sites… now it’s spread to YouTube as well.

The other day I wrote about how advertisers have been using the March Madness NCAA tournament feeds online to reach out to a dedicated college hoops fan base, and now Pontiac is sponsoring a whole channel of the video feeds on YouTube. The car manufacturer has been sponsoring the CBS SportsLine site for sometime, and going the extra step with the company to create the CBS Sports NCAA Tournament Channel sponsored by Pontiac on YouTube. CBS’s CSTV will also be supplying the video feeds of the games.

As part of the sponsorship, Pontiac is also providing a “Game Changing Performances” poll at NCAASports.com that the YouTube community will be encouraged to vote on.
The top vote earning team of the Pontiac challenge will be announced live on CBS during halftime of the NCAA championship game on Monday, April 2, and the winning team’s school will receive a $100,000 general scholarship.

Update: Yup, no longer contained… it’s been confirmed (sorta). Just after making this post, the folks over at CBS SportsLine sent over some statistics. They said that approximately 800,000 people have registered for March Madness on Demand (MMOD), that those registrants have visited the MMOD video player over 1.5 million times, and prior to tip-off of the first game of the day (Maryland vs. Davidson) there were 189,000 users waiting in line to get into the MMOD video player.

Madness indeed.