US Masters: ESPN experiences a tigerish rise in ratings

Published on Saturday 10 April 2010 00:47

THE ESPN television network enjoyed a 50 per cent surge in ratings for its opening-day broadcast of the Masters golf tournament as Tiger Woods made his comeback from a sex scandal, early audience figures suggested yesterday.

The Masters concludes tomorrow and CBS will broadcast the tournament today and tomorrow while ESPN aired it Thursday and yesterday.

The cable TV sports network, which is owned by the Walt Disney Co, reached 3.6 per cent of households in major US cities where the audience was measured on Thursday, said ESPN spokesman Dave Nagle. That is a 50 per cent increase from a year ago when ESPN reached 2.4 per cent of the same households, and a total of 3.4 million viewers, with its first day broadcast of the Masters.

"There obviously was a big build up to his return to the tour and it brought in a much larger audience beyond the core golf fan," Nagle said.

Woods playing at the Masters marks his return to the game after announcing in December that he would take a break from the sport following media revelations of his extra-marital affairs with women. If comments posted on social networking websites are any indication, Woods may soon be free of any image problems.

Research firm Viralheat said 70 per cent of comments about Woods on social networking websites on Thursday were positive. Similar trends were seen earlier this week, the firm said.

"He's not pure as the driven snow any more but he's still a great golfer," said Cooper Lawrence, author of The Cult of Celebrity. "He didn't cheat on us. He cheated on his wife – frankly, it's none of our business that way."

When ESPN broke away from its standard programming to show Woods teeing off at the Masters, its viewership for that hour doubled to 0.8 per cent of households in major US cities, Nagle said. Around that time, more than 17,500 comments mentioning Woods were posted on the social network website Twitter.com, the tracking firm Trendrr said. Nearly 11,000 Twitter comments were made when Woods gave a news conference Monday.

Celebrity websites such as TMZ.com devoted more attention to the spectacle surrounding Woods than his play.

Bob Thompson, a TV expert at Syracuse University, noted that ESPN's coverage of the Masters gave little mention to Woods' affairs and that fact lessened its appeal for a big segment of the audience. "Usually this kind of thing would have been exploited to the hilt and this time it wasn't," Thompson said.