Compete Ranks Top College Sports-Related Content and Search Terms for March 2010

Boston MA, –  (April 29, 2010) -- Compete, a Kantar Media company, today released its ranking of the top college sports-related content and search terms for March 2010. March Madness is always a boon for the sports category, and this year's Cinderella stories and major upsets continued the trend. In fact, Compete's college sports category recorded a bigger jump in March than "shopping blogs" and "business blogs," rising 84 percent over the prior month and pulling in more than 10 million UV's. Enticing fans by offering live streaming games online, NCAA.com beat out news sites such as Bloomberg.com and businessweek.com for UV's, realizing a remarkable 982 percent traffic increase over the prior months. Riding this wave of interest were individual college and university sites, such as sienasaints.com and smcgaels.com, undoubtedly a result of people looking for help filling out their tournament brackets.

NCAA All The Way

As March Madness reached fever pitch, online traffic to the college sports category skyrocketed. Millions of NCAA fans hunting for updates on the men's and women's basketball and hockey tournaments, helped the college sports category bring in roughly 10 million UVs. NCAA.com, the biggest mover, outpaced sites such as bloomberg.com, businessweek.com and newsweek.com, attracting more than 5,000,000 UVs in March. NCAA.com attracted millions of viewers with their "March Madness on Demand" offering, which allowed people to stream videos of every NCAA tournament game live online. The "On Demand" games were a major hit with fans and the subdomain, mmod.ncaa.com, ended up attracting about 3,000,000 UVs in March alone. Along with impressive traffic, four out of the top five key word searches for the college sports category included the acronym NCAA in some capacity; the most-widely searched term was "ncaa," followed by "ncaa basketball tournament 2010," "ncaa basketball," "march madness" and "ncaa.com."

Conference vs. College

In March, another battle was waged between sports content from different colleges. In the top college sports category, for instance, Kentucky University's site, ukathletics.com, came in at number three with more than 300,000 UVs – a remarkable yearly increase of 79 percent. Conference-related sites also captured strong traffic across the board, with theacc.com, secsports.com, bigten.org, bigeast.org and big12sports.com all top ten movers for March. The ACC conference was undoubtedly led by deep runs by powerhouse Duke, and fellow conference competitors Wake and Clemson.

Saints, Panthers and Bears, Oh My!

Cinderella stories and major upsets once again pulled in more casual fans into the tourney frenzy. The Siena Saints, considered a "team to watch," saw an astonishing 66,220 percent increase in monthly traffic to sienasaints.com and was the top mover in the college sports category. The other story, of course, was Butler, which many touted as the real-life Hoosiers. Butlerbears.com attracted more than 90,000 UVs and "butler university" was in the top 50 most searched terms for the college sports category. Not be outdone, the UNI Panthers, who upset Kansas early in the tournament, destroyed millions of brackets and attracted more than 88,000 UVs to unipanthers.com, a 275 percent monthly change.

Information regarding aggregate Web categories is drawn from the Compete PRO Enterprise edition on Compete.com. For more information on the enterprise offering, please contact gblackmore@compete.com.

About Compete
Compete, a Kantar Media company, helps the world's top brands improve their marketing based on the online behavior of millions of consumers. Leading marketers such as Carlson Hotels Worldwide, Hyundai Motor America, Upromise, Chrysler, and Verizon Wireless rely on Compete's services to create effective online experiences and highly profitable advertising campaigns. Compete's online behavior database—the largest in the industry—makes the Web as ingrained in marketing as it is in people's lives. Compete was founded in 2000 and is located in Boston, MA, with offices throughout the U.S. For more information about us, please visit www.competeinc.com/, or to join the conversation visit www.compete.com/.

About Kantar
Kantar is one of the world's largest insight, information and consultancy networks. By uniting the diverse talents of its 13 specialist companies, the group aims to become the pre-eminent provider of compelling and inspirational insights for the global business community. Its 26,500 employees work across 95 countries and across the whole spectrum of research and consultancy disciplines, enabling the group to offer clients business insights at each and every point of the consumer cycle. The group's services are employed by over half of the Fortune Top 500 companies. For further information, please visit us at www.kantar.com.