Over the weekend, the two leading March Madness applications saw a large jump in their active users as Facebook users prepare for the upcoming NCAA Touranment. Watercooler’s 2009 Bracket Challenge saw a large jump in their active user base to over 111,000 users. The CBSSports.com tournament application saw a jump of over 22,000 users.
We’ll most likely see numerous other bracket applications released over the coming week but these two applications have already launched and have seen an uptick in active users. Last time around some developers complained when CBSSports.com received premium promotional placement over the news feed for a few days. While that promotion has not yet begun, we’re guessing that we’ll see something similar again.
With March only a week away, users are ramping up as March Madness is typically an active time for Facebook given their close to 100 percent market saturation among college students. The applications typically attract millions of users and this year will most likely be no different. This weekend was just the beginning of the promotions.
Last year we saw over 20 applications targeted to the March Madness crowd with Watercooler and CBSSports.com leading the pack. While Watercooler is currently leading, we’ll have to see if Facebook’s annual promotions pop-up once again. Last year there was significant controversy over whether or not the CBSSports.com application reviews were actually posted by users.
At one point posting reviews of your own application with fake user accounts was becoming a standard practice. Hopefully by now we’ve grown out of application review arguments. For now we’ll have to wait and see as March Madness is just beginning to heat up.
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Man I was so frustrated with Facebook last season and their crappy CBS app. I loved it originally when facebook did it and rank it was fun comparing yourself with your friends and what not. We'll see, I'm also going to use ESPN if they do it again.
Comment by mojaam — February 23, 2009 @ 7:33 am
Thanks for writing about our app Nick. We've added about 130K new users over the last 5 days, so things are definitely picking up for NCAA basketball in preparation for March Madness. And if you believe Facebook's MAU numbers we're up to 146K MAUs. We have a great foundation of passionate sports fans across our ~600 sports apps, so that helps.
Bryan Bennett
Sr. Director of Marketing
Watercooler
Comment by Bryan Bennett — February 23, 2009 @ 9:45 am
http://apps.facebook.com/bracket has over 90,000 active users right now and isn’t mentioned in the article.
Comment by Brian — February 23, 2009 @ 6:48 pm