Corporate Users and the March Madness Temptation

Over 50% increase in Sports Related Bandwidth Usage

Those not familiar with Zscaler, Inc. – we provide Security Software as a Service (SaaS) to protect customers from web-based threats as well as enforce customer policy decisions. We see traffic from over 140 different countries, and process millions of web transactions every day. Our customer user base is composed primarily of corporate end-users. Based on these facts, Zscaler is in a unique position to conduct stats and trends for corporate end-user web usage during the NCAA basketball tournament.

I pulled the numbers for transactions to sports related websites for March 2010 and as suspected, there was a noticeable increase in requests to sports related websites. In order to best quantify the activity I added the total HTTP request and response size (bytes) per day to sports related sites - I call this bandwidth usage. I calculated a trend line for weekday and weekend traffic. Because our users are mostly corporate users, there is a general decline in weekend web usage, so the actual trends are more visible by trending weekday and weekend traffic separately.

The blue line represents the weekday trend and the red the weekend trend. The light-grey Y-Axis lines are the bandwidth values in KB – the actual numbers are not shown, but the difference between each line is 100,000 KBs. What we see are the following percentage increases for sports related bandwidth usage during March 2010:

• 37% increase during weekday traffic
• 68% increase during weekend traffic
• The mean between these two, is a 52.5% increase in sports related bandwidth usage

There are a number of March related sports events, including the PGA tournament and the IPL cricket tournament (as I mentioned, Zscaler has a global user-base). As the trendlines show there is an increase in activity in the later March dates, corresponding with the NCAA tournament games:

• First-round games (March 18-19)
• Second-round games (March 20-21)

The two premier websites providing coverage of the NCAA tournament are ncaa.com and cbssports.com. Below is a chart of bandwidth usage to these two domains over March:


Other NCAA dates visible within the data are the NCAA division championships March 12-14 and the NCAA tournament selection (“Selection Sunday”) March 14. The trend line shows roughly a 95% increase in bandwidth to these two domains over March.

While corporations may turn a blind-eye to their employees spending time online monitoring their brackets and watching the amazing upsets that have occurred in this year’s tournament – this increase in sports related web usage, likely means a drop in productivity and potentially associated costs with respect to bandwidth usage. However, most would argue that the tournament and its associated office pools provide a welcomed increase in moral … that is of course, unless you are a die-hard fan of one of the top-seeds that has been upset ;)