CBS wants you to surf its sites but doesn’t want a portal to call its own. Will its strategy work?

March is a great month for office-bound but work-bereft sports fans with speedy company Internet connections. On Friday, at 12:30 p.m. ET, they could watch Marquette take on Utah State in a real-time college basketball throw-down, thanks to the “March Madness On Demand” free video-streaming site (complete with a “Boss Button” to bring up an Excel-like spreadsheet, which recorded 3 million clicks in 2008). Then, in preparation for the new baseball season, they could surf over to Sportsline and study player stats in advance of their fantasy draft.

While the time-wasting effects of the Final Four may be inflated, surely all this online activity means a mint for the sites’ proprietor, CBS? The company is expanding its Internet presence, with investments in sports properties like those above and with a $1.8 billion acquisition of tech portal CNet Networks in May 2008. CBS’s interactive division now runs Web sites from foodie property Chow to geek paradise Startrek.com. It’s a tangle of niche audiences, each taking a slice of online traffic by stealth, with little CBS trace. CBS is now a solid No. 2 player in many online realms, but while it’s growing its library of offerings, it doesn’t control the game-changing means of production. Its niche-picking feels more like an assembly of tactics rather than a full-blown strategy.

The CBS acquisition of CNET seemed dollars long and years late at the time. It was a respected player in technology news and reviews, but the 10-figure amount (paying a 45 percent premium over CNET’s stock value) seemed pretty dear for a company better known for its underused but potentially useful URLs (news.com, TV.com, even com.com) than for its online time-sucking potential. Meanwhile Fox’s acquisition of a majority stake in MySpace three years earlier for less than one-third of the cost came with an initial audience of 22 million, growing at 2 million a month, all served up on a platter for Rupert Murdoch’s edification.

Now, the acquisition is returning a profit (the unit as a whole turned an operating profit of $28.7 million on revenues of $186.3 million in the last quarter of 2008 after incurring a loss in 2007) and has moved CBS Interactive up to second place in total page views among major media sites (CBS’s 53.5 million visitors in January 2009 was dwarfed by the Fox empire’s 90.5 million users but puts it ahead of media rivals New York Times, Disney/ABC/ESPN, Time Warner, and NBC).