• by Masha Geller , March 15, 2002

It’s March Madness on the web. According to Nielsen//NetRatings, surfers flocked to the Internet from home during the week ending March 10, for the latest news and analysis of the men's NCAA basketball tournament. Various sports sites such as SportsLine.com, SportingNews.com, ESPN, Fansonly.com, CNNsi and FinalFour.net all posted gains in traffic.

Traffic to SportsLine.com jumped 36% to more than 1.4 million surfers, as compared to 1.1 million surfers the week prior. SportingNews.com attracted 440,000 visitors, posting a 21% increase while ESPN grew 11% to nearly 3.4 million visitors. Fansonly.com jumped 9% to 555,000 surfers while CNNsi grew 3% to 2.6 million surfers. FinalFour.net, the official site of the NCAA Final Four Tournament, drew 198,000 surfers this past week.

Elsewhere on the web, AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, Microsoft and Google continued to be the most popular properties with both at-home and at-work audiences last week.

Last week, the average at-home surfer went online 7 times, spending just over 3 hours and 40 minutes surfing. At work, the average surfer went online 13 times, spending an average 7 hours and 19 minutes surfing. The average duration of a page viewed is 54 second for at-home users, and 57 seconds for office surfers.

The current U.S. Internet Universe, according to NetRatings, stands at 166.2 million at-home users and 45 million at-work users.