Tiger Woods: The Sports Tech Story of the Century?
Posted by Jonathan in INTERNET, MOBILE, TELEVISION on 02-23-10 No Comments
Get over it, Tiger cheating on the missus is the story of our times.
Just look at the data video tape.
At first techno-blush, the Tiger Woods press conference seemed almost like a digital non-event. CNN.com’s International Edition did a nice job pointing out that the press conference did middling Twitter traffic and almost no Facebook buzz. The Obama Inauguration, for example, was a much bigger deal. And in fact, the conference only generated about 800K downloads of the video feed on YouTube. That’s small Web potatoes for sure.
But the cable news ratings were far higher. Nielsen numbers floating around say that FoxNews reported 2.1 million saw the conference, with ESPN, CNN, The Golf Channel, HeadlineNews and MSNBC also running the event; and totaling 4.5 million additional viewers watching — for something on the order of 6.6 million viewers in the cable universe. Or about the size of a season average middle year of The Sopranos. Maybe these potatoes are bigger than we thought.
And there was broadcast: NBC, ABC and CBS also ran the conference. For some reason, there’s no public data that I could find for how many viewers tuned in. But that’s no biggie to tease out. The news audience is well understood. So lets guesstimate that the Tiger event equaled the standing nightly news audience, which usually combines to deliver about 20 million viewers. (That’s probably low, to be honest. Event viewing is usually much higher. But you’ll see it does not matter.)
That combines for about 26 million people, net of broadcast and cable, who saw the conference — or way more than the 22 million who saw Game Six of last year’s World Series. Tiger is big sports potatoes indeed.
And this pile is only a fraction of the total audience who is aware of Tiger. Now the figures get simply mind boggling. The Google news scraper for the terms “tiger woods” for mid day Feb. 23 show a total of 12,000 plus news stories on that topic. TWELVE THOUSAND! Or roughly 12 times the size of the coverage for white hot tech stories like the Apple iPad, which out are lucky to garner 1,500 stories.
Now how many people read all those stories? Again, no hard data exists, but we can make an excellent guess. There are now 6 billion worldwide cell phone subscribers that have easy access to this digital Tiger hype information, which makes it entirely probable that the full English language speaking world, or roughly 3 billion people, had direct touch with this story. And it is also probably that these people told someone else they saw it, meaning, … everybody, everywhere on earth knows the deal with Tiger.
Name another event that comes close to this level of world wide awareness? I can’t. Can you?
And can it get any more delicious than this: The digital revolution with all its wonders of silicon, IP packets and crystal glass has made a simple story about a golfer cheating on wife into the most well known thing ever.
Not bad, for a man standing in front a blue curtain. Talking.
You can’t make it up.
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