Four weeks after the debut of the Creator Classic, the PGA Tour released viewership data showing big numbers in the digital space.
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When the PGA Tour announced the creation of its first impact golf tour, “The classic creator”, they left a big question unanswered.
Why?
Not that it’s ever a bad idea to create a web-based event aimed at engaging young golf fans. In fact, quite the opposite. Golf wonks have called for the Tour to invest in its turnaround ancient demographic viewership for decades, and these calls have only grown in the years following the sport’s pandemic boom. The tournament’s recent decline in television ratings only seemed to reinforce calls to engage with a new viewing audience, especially as LIV built and promoted a television business around younger fans.
In other words, the problem was that the tournament’s motives didn’t seem quite believable. After all, a central criticism of the Tour’s entertainment business for years is that it has too often focused on making money first and thinking about the bigger picture. (That’s the thinking that led the tournament to television rights deals that earn enormous sums for players but regularly draw the ire of fans tired of ads and narrow networks.) An event like the Creator Classic brought tremendous audience growth potential, but served little or no major business benefit to the PGA Tour, which couldn’t sell nearly the same volume of advertising as a typical professional event. of golf. Was the Tour willing to incur the (admittedly low) production and talent costs simply as an engagement experiment?
Now, a month later, we seem to have an answer. On Friday morning, shortly before the televised alternate matches of the Presidents Cup began, the Tour released viewership data from the Classic detailing the big gains with new, first-to-air viewers it was trying to reach in trial. According to the Tour, the event garnered more than 2 million total views, ranking as the No. 2 trending on YouTube for its first 24 hours and delivering 118,000 concurrent viewers at its peak. The event was also the most viewed, liked, commented and shared YouTube video on Tour in 2024 and contributed to the biggest day of subscriber growth on the channel in the account’s history.
The numbers give us a broader view of the earnings from the nine-hole, 16-player event that featured some of the internet’s biggest golf stars and aired on Wednesday ahead of the Tour Championship. They also provide insight into the event’s first, unanswered question: why would the PGA Tour bother hosting talent it doesn’t have for an event it can’t really earn money?
The answer, at least according to the PGA Tour, is that the event provided a mutual handshake between the Tour’s digital properties and golf’s digital creators. Each side wanted to benefit from the legitimacy and audience provided by the other, which was good enough to push both sides into a deal.
While the numbers won’t change much in terms of the tournament’s TV business, they tell a good story about the tournament. YouTube subscribers and followers won’t be enough to stem the tide of steadily declining TV ratings, but they do offer the tournament its first glimpse of access to a younger and younger viewership base. And while the solution to the tournament’s woes won’t be as simple as 52 Creators Classics a year (for that, they have to convince their players to hand over a piece of the TV revenue pie), it’s encouraging to see the organization was open to new ideas.
At worst, it’s a well-earned positive news cycle. At best, it could be our first look at something more.
