• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, February 8, 2008

Every March, CBS Sports can expect its biggest yearly spike in Web traffic and ad revenue, thanks to its hugely popular coverage of the NCAA college basketball tournament.

Not taking any chances this year, CBS has enlisted the help of Facebook to host an NCAA March Madness Brackets application for the social network's 63 million active users to predict the tournament's winners and losers in 2008.

"This presents an ideal opportunity to extend the CBSSports.com brand," said Jason Kint, senior vice president and general manager of CBSSports.com, describing Facebook as "an extremely viral social utility with a tremendous core of both college students and alumni."

Located at www.facebook.com/brackets, the application also invites members to compare and contrast their picks with friends, and scour through the collective tournament coverage of CBS Sports, CSTV, CBSSports.com and NCAA.com, including links to watch the games live.

CBS's MMOD requires cooperation between the NCAA and CBS Sports, which is CBS's television division; CBS SportsLine.com, which is CBS Digital's main sports property; and college sports site CSTV, which CBS acquired in 2006 for $325 million.

A mobile companion will let users follow and engage the application's "Smack Talk Wall" and rank competing schools directly from their phone via the CBS Sports Mobile Web site. In 2007, more than 2.6 million Facebook users joined at least one bracket group in a similar tournament brackets feature run by the site.

In 2006, March Madness on Demand surpassed all expectations by pulling in more than 19 million streams of live and archived game action. In addition, the service recorded over 5 million visits during the tournament, with a total of 1.3 million users registered.

That year, CBS's on-demand service replaced an existing subscription model, which required consumers to pay $19.99 for extensive tournament coverage.

To accommodate the service's huge popularity, in 2007, CBS doubled the service's bandwidth capacity through agreements with Content Data Networks and Akamai Technologies. CBS also widened the player's screen by 50% from 320 X 240 pixels to 480 X 360 pixels, and added live radio broadcasts and a live halftime show produced by CBS SportsLine and sponsored by AT&T.

For the online games, CBS SportsLine runs ads specifically created for MMOD rather than those being broadcast on CBS television, thus guaranteeing incremental revenue streams.

In 2006, ad spending for MMOD was about $4 million, and then surpassed $9 million in 2007. Among the more than 30 MMOM advertisers last year were Courtyard by Marriott, Dell, State Farm, AT&T and its wireless unit, and Kraft Foods and its DiGiorno frozen pizza brand. Advertisers for 2008 have yet to be announced.

CBS and CSTV first started working together in 2004, when CSTV launched March Madness on Demand, allowing consumers to watch live CBS Sports NCAA Tournament broadcasts for the $20 subscription fee.

CBS SportsLine.com produces "out-of-market" games, so-called because only games that are not being broadcast live on consumers' local television markets are available to stream on MMOD.