After three months in silence from the scandal made a serious dent in his reputation, career, his marriage, and so on, Tiger Woods already made his first public appearance. He chose to offer his apologies online and live, bypassing traditional media coverage. While the actual apology probably didn’t fool that many people, it seems to have done the trick and boosted his approval quite a bit. Regardless of the outcome, it’s clear that people really wanted to know what he had to say, with almost 700,000 tuning into the live video on Ustream alone, 683,000 to be specific.

Not only were a lot of people watching Woods apology, but they were talking about it as well, with over 93,000 tweets about it in just the first hour after the stream. Ustream’s live chat feature, one of the main draws of the site, was disabled during the actual stream, so it only managed to rack up 3,300 comments. In any case, fake or not, the apology managed to sway the hearts of quite a few people and, according to one digital-marketing firm, Woods approval rating hit 68 percent, up from a low point of 48 percent in December. Still, he has some way to go before reaching the approval rating he had before the whole scandal, a sky-high 91 percent.

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