Over the first four days of the NCAA men's basketball tournament, CBSSports.com drew 3.3 million unique visitors to the March Madness on Demand video player. That's over twice what they drew in the same number of day last year, increasing by 129 percent.
The 222,305,520 overall videos streamed over the first four days have already beat all the live video streaming minutes in the tournament last year, which equaled 162,974,160.
When you listen to the reason why the number of minutes have increased by CBS (NYSE:CBS-A), it's something to think about when we do things on our Web sites.
The reason for the increased viewing? They dropped one of the barriers that caused fans to click away without participating: requirement to register to view the video streams.
They also expanded the number of links to include over 200 Web sites that pointed to the live video feed.
For online marketers, the think we have to ask is if losing the growing of our lists is worth increasing unique visitors to our sites. The answer isn't simple because it depends on how we're monetizing our business, and could change from product or service offered.
We also have to consider whether we're building customer lists, branding, direct selling or using an ad model as the purpose for our Web sites. Some online marketers may be doing more than one at once.
Depending on our purpose, gaining a huge amount of traffic isn't always the best way to do business, if after everything is said and done, you get nothing in return.
An email list is something that can be tapped over years to offer products and services to, and we would need to think hard to get rid of sign-up boxes for the purpose of driving more traffic to a Web site. It would be like selling the gold mine to get a quick profit windfall. What happens after that?
There's no right answer here. Again, it all depends on what you're trying to do. Since I always operate in the long term way of doing business, I probably would never drop the registration process in exchange for getting names to send email messages to.
At the same time, if I had a business that demanded a lot of traffic, I probably wouldn't put a registration form up in the first place, and just drive the kind of traffic I would need to succeed in the other areas; of branding, direct sales and ad placement.
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