One way to gauge the popularity of a story is by measuring how many people are searching for the subject on the internet. And a comparison to some other popular sports stories in recent memory shows that the Manti Te'o story is not only not that big, it is already dying.
Below is a look at the google search trends for Manti Te'o, Tim Tebow, and Jeremy Lin over the last 13 months. All results are scaled to the largest search volume (Jeremy Lin in February, which gets a score of 100). The search volume for Te'o peaked at less than 20% of the peak of Linsanity. In fact, Te'o barely outscored Lin signing with the Rockets as a free agent and fell behind several big moments during Tebowmania.
So if Te'o wants the story to just go away, he's off to a good start...
Data via Google
