I found it interesting that there was a stream on twitch.tv that had over 10,000 viewers for this. It's how I found it, not being much a chess follower but still finding the game interesting. I was a very surprised to see so many viewers.
Well, once upon a time (i.e. 42 years ago), during the Cold War, we had the "Match of the Century"[1], aka Fischer-Spassky. The dominant evil empire USSR against the upstart USA. Played in Reykjavík, Iceland over a period lasting more than 6 weeks. Certainly more than 10,000 people were "interested" in the proceedings.
I was "glued" to the local NYC PBS station as Shelby Lyman "narrated". Those two words are in quotes, because moves might arrive two or three at a time, about every 15 or 30 minutes or so. In the meantime poor Shelby could do nothing but ad-lib, speculate as to what might be happening. The local PBS station devoted many many hours a week to this play-by-play.
Times have changed.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship_1972
Both VG and NRK do a great job of making the streams accessible and fun to ordinary people who aren't really into chess, and a lot probably watch due to national proudness, yet it's still cool to see so high ratings for chess.
VG has a great interface for the games, with text updates, computer calculations, tweet/questions, best moves, live stream from studio etc: http://direkte.vg.no/studio/sjakkvm2014-9
He's an interesting personality. I enjoy watching him. He did the same thing during the last grandmaster match of Carlsen v. Anand.
I hope he keeps it up; it certainly has rekindled my appreciation for chess.
It's also the beauty of chess - you can be down by a mile and come back when your opponent blunders. At my level (awful) it happens all the time.