Kevin Iole of Yahoo! Sports penned an informative article about the HBO-Showtime boxing viewership this year which turns out to be a great time for the boxing fans. It also shows the HBO-Top Rank v. Showtime-Golden Boy is heating up.
Iole reports that 25 events on HBO and Showtime scored over 1 million viewers in 2013. 21 of the 25 were HBO fights. The seeming dominance comes despite HBO severing ties with Golden Boy Promotions. Even though HBO had the better ratings, Showtime can claim one of the biggest PPVs ever this year with the Mayweather-Canelo fight grabbing 2.2 million PPV buys.
On Saturday, the two networks competed for boxing fans with dueling events that took place in the same area (HBO –Atlantic City) (Showtime – Brooklyn). HBO’s ratings were disappointing as the main event featuring Guillermo Rigondeux drew just 550K viewers according to Nielsen (via Dan Rafael). In comparison, Showtime’s main event of Malignaggi-Judah received a 640K viewer average. (via Rafael tweet).
Payout Perspective:
Regardless of which premium network won the ratings war, the overarching statement is that viewers are watching boxing and 2013 has been a big year for the sport and HBO and Showtime. The competition and venom between Top Rank-Golden Boy has seemingly fostered better fights and overall events. With the continued boxing programming on each network, fight fans that don’t have both premium channels may look into the investment for 2014.
Pretty good
Only problem, HBO gives us some weak undercard fights.
GB is killing them in terms of match ups.
GSP, UFC’s #1 PPV draw, abruptly walks away from the sport and the sports news media aren’t even reporting it.
If Mayweather or Pacquiao called a hasty press conference to retire or “walk away” it would be big news.
It was covered by the media. Also those boxers don’t have tv deals like the UFC does. Because the UFC signed with Fox. Networls like ESPN have cut back on the attention they give the UFC. That said. I did see the news roll across ESPN. Not to mention it wasn’t known what GSP was going to announce. At first people expected his to say something about retiring. But then Dana come out and said this press conference was set up long ago to promote an opening of a Mall or store. Dana also said GSP was very unlikely to retire. So all that caused people to not to expect him to take time away. Made the conference unimportant. The fact it happened in Canada (I believe) and that didn’t help draw media.
Honestly I have lost a lot of respect for GSP over this. The one time he takes a few lumps and takes his ball and goes home. The truth is he is in the same boat as Jones. Both have to look forward to rematches that due to styles. There is no way either guy can with the fight without taking a beating in a war. Jones has tried to avoid it by picking his opponents and distancing himself from a rematch with Gus. GSP has found another way to avoid Hendricks. I don’t think Hendricks is unbeatable. But he is a nightmare for GSP. GSP is going to sit out and hope someone takes out Hendricks. Trying to pull a Randy Couture. Sit out and cherry pick when you come back and who you fight.
BS,
“Also those boxers don’t have tv deals like the UFC does.”
You don’t even do the most basic of research before commenting do you? Mayweather has an exclusive deal with Showtime/CBS. It was kind of a big sports story recently.
Im talking about Network TV. FMJ isn’t showing his fights on CBS. Therefore he isn’t competing against any of the major news or media outlets. The only network that competes with Showtime is HBO. Not even cable networks care about those premium networks. Their reach is way to small to have much effect on Network or cable. Just look at this recent boxing matches. Both in the 500-600K range. Basically worse than Bellator numbers. But FS1 is competing directly with ESPN and every major sports network that would typically cover something like this.
BS,
“Just look at this recent boxing matches. Both in the 500-600K range. Basically worse than Bellator numbers.”
Right…..look at the recent boxing matches. Don’t look at and take into account they were “dueling events.” And definitely don’t look at the 25 other boxing matches on HBO/SHOWTIME a which was the main point of this article on mmapayout.
Here is a better source.
http://sports.yahoo.com/news/despite-split-with-golden-boy–hbo-continued-to-dominate-cable-ratings-in-banner-boxing-year-204009683.html
Look at the ratings at the bottom. There were not too many Bellator events that did better. Nor FS1 UFC events for that matter.
No, ESPN barely covered. And not at all as it actually happened. Only many hours later.
If Mayweather had retired they would have immediately reported it..
Instead they talked about the NFL and college football.
ESPN covers the UFC, but avoid covering MMA. Never seen any other MMA orgs/promotions on there, even when they had a show called “MMA Live”.
A lot of paranoia among UFC fans.
interesting, again I ran BS out of a topic