ESPN Boasts Enormous Audience for Tiger Woods Statement

The folks in Bristol no doubt would have preferred for Tiger Woods to give an exclusive interview to an ESPN reporter last week, rather than read a statement into a camera without taking any questions. But as ESPN itself boasted in a press release distributed Monday, last week's statement worked out quite well for ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNews, ESPN.com, ESPN Radio and the (approximately) 872 other ESPN platforms that offered Tiger coverage on Friday.

Among the highlights, via ESPN's PR department:

-- ESPN more than tripled its audience from the same time slot 24 hours earlier
-- ESPN2's audience was 48 percent larger than the day before
-- ESPNews more than quadrupled its audience from the day before.
-- The live stream of the press conference got the biggest audience ever on ESPN.com.
-- ESPN Mobile had its biggest video day of the year.
-- ESPNRadio.com got its biggest audience for any live stream ever.

Looking at those numbers, ESPN2 (which was showing First Take at the time) probably has to be considered a disappointment for improving its audience by only 48 percent. But I'm sure that was more than made up for by the ESPN Zone selling a record number of chicken wings and The Ocho doubling its usual dodgeball audience.

At any rate, people (myself included) sometimes criticize ESPN for going wall-to-wall on one topic across all its platforms and inundating fans with a topic they might not particularly care about. But the truth is that when ESPN goes on one of these huge feeding frenzies, they're usually doing it to satisfy an enormous public appetite.