Mercedes Ratings Put Medicus, LaLanne Infomercials To Shame

Unfortunately, according to a reader who gets Street and Smith's Sports Business Daily report, Golf Channel's four-round live coverage of the Mercedes Benz Championship averaged 370,728 households, down 44% from the event's four round average on ESPN last year.

The final round averaged a 505,129 households, down 49% from ESPN's 997,310 households in 2006.

Ty Votaw, The PGA Tour's Executive Vice President of Whatever Bob Combs Used To Be In Charge Of, issued this statement...

"Conclusions after only one event--and the first event--in this relationship are not terribly productive. We're pleased with what we achieved in that first event because they were consistent with our projections. 

So even if the numbers were lousy, our VP of Number Crunching got it right, so it's all good! 

We're on track with respect to where the Golf Channel is in distribution.

And that means? 

Production quality, energy levels of the commentators and the way they could personalize the players to a much greater degree were huge positives...

 Yeah those energy levels will pay the bills...

...if you compare what we've been able to achieve in this first week with the numbers in comparison to previous Golf Channel programming numbers, we're doing precisely what the Golf Channel has paid us to do: cause people to find the PGA Tour on the Golf Channel."

They are paying us to up their numbers.

Of course, the Tour's sponsors are also paying handsomely for certain numbers.