NCAA.com and March Madness Live averaged two million combined daily online unique visitors during the week extending from the March 11 Selection Sunday through the March 18 completion of the third round of the NCAA men's basketball tournament, down 2% from last year. Similarly, NCAA.com and MML generated 3.6 million online unique visitors and 6.9 million visits across all platforms on March 15, the start of the second round of the tournament and generally considered the full start of the event, down 12% and 9%, respectively, from the comparable day last year. The traffic decreases are a first for the digital deployment of the tournament, and mark the initial immediate results of Turner Sports' significant shift this year to a paid content and TV authentication business model for the event. But as expected, MML continues to see hefty jumps in mobile traffic as streaming consumption there grew 11% during the second and third rounds compared to last year, and total visits across mobile apps grew 19%, according to Turner data.
