Kevin Iole of Yahoo! Sports reports that the initial reports for Pacquiao-Bradley II received between 800,000 to 825,000 PPV buys.
Although the PPV numbers have not been finalized, the estimates are below the Pacquiao boon period between his coming out fight against Oscar de la Hoya in December 2008 and his third fight against Juan Manuel Marquez in November 2011. In the seven fight span over the three years his PPVs averaged over 1 million PPV buys. Last November’s return against Brandon Rios received a pedestrian 475,000 PPV buys.
Industry experts believed the rematch with Bradley would do 700,000 PPV buys while Bob Arum thought the fight would exceed 1 million PPV buys. If the 800K-825K PPV buys holds up, it lands in the middle of the estimates. Iole cites Pacquiao’s inability to put away an opponent in recent memory as reason for the less than terrific numbers. He also cites a sub-par 24/7 HBO series which curiously did not focus much on Pacquiao.
Payout Perspective:
The 800-825K PPV buys is on Pacquiao. You may recall last year’s Bradley-Marquez fight was considered a success having drawn 375,000 PPV buys. One might conclude Bradley was not the major draw here even though he was the one that defeated Pacquiao in their first fight.
800-825K PPV buys still garners this fight somewhere in the neighborhood of $56M-$58M in PPV revenue alone. But the fissures in the Pacquiao domination on the boxing world are starting to show. The gate for this fight was lower than most Pacquiao fights and there was less sponsorship activation around the fight. Noticably, Telecommunications Company Smart Communications, Sony (Playstation 4) and Tecate were the only major sponsors for the fight. Pacquiao will continue to box, but we are beginning to see the down side of one of the greatest draws in boxing.
I think the numbers are pretty good, no one was really expecting the rematch to turn into the great fight that it became, plus it almost reached twice the numbers than his last PPV. Pacquiao showed that he is still one of the greats, even at his age… still looking for that knockout, still aggressive, still exciting… i am sure the numbers will keep increasing.
Cha Ching!!!
LOL! Is that all? WWE regulary attracts these kinds of buys! WWE could put on a show with Mid Card talent main eventing and get more than 1 million buys. I suppose its still better than UFC
Sampson Simpson wwe never does these numbers only once a year for there wrestlemania card every other card is average 150,000 to 350,0000 .. Wrestlemania in the last 5 years has averaged 700,000 to a 950,000
I have an admirer macking duplicate accounts. Sad what Zuffa desparatelt does
Sampson Simpson, It wasn’t better than Weidman-Silva II, which did over a million buys.
Dont believe those numbers for 1 second im sure the fight did between 500,00 to 700,000 buys