Florida-BYU most-watched game in Web history?

By Adam Silverstein
June 25, 2010

ESPN claims the United States soccer team’s exhilarating 1-0 extra-time victory over Algeria on Wednesday drew the “largest U.S. audience ever for a sports event on the Web.” CBS refutes that assertion, stating that the viewing crowd put together for the opening game of the 2010 NCAA Tournament – featuring the Florida Gators and Brigham Young Cougars – surpassed that by a few thousand.

OGGOA attempted to reach out to CBS Friday for more information than provided by the initial story from Mediaweek, but we were unsuccessful as they did not have any specific release on the matter to send us. However, CBS did cite the Florida-BYU game because it got the highest ratings out of any of their online broadcasts for March Madness this past year. Nevertheless, ESPN senior director of digital media research backs up the organization’s claim, citing that “CBS isn’t comparing their apples to our apples.”

2 Comments

  1. SC Gator says:

    I’m perfectly willing to believe that the soccer match holds the record but the argument that “CBS isn;t comparing their apples to our apples” sounds like something that would be expected of a petulant child.

  2. Charles says:

    Aw, paw wittle Espn got der feeling hurts. The whole apples to our apples sounds like CBS is correct, but ESPN is now going to say well ours is a soccer match and we all know soccer isn’t in the top 3 sports of America. Plus I tend to believe that the viewers of the CBS Florida-BYU game were mostly American Citizens, while the viewers of ESPN’s world cup soccer match … probably wasn’t as high. The other reason why the world cup match would garner near enough viewership is the whole Patriotism of the country, we still have enough to watch a boring sport where in 90 minutes of actual play, only 1 team scored and they only scored once. That sucks.

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