Kevin Iole of Yahoo! Sports tweeted the ratings for the live event featuring Bernard Hopkins on Showtime and the HBO replay of Pacquiao-Bradley II. The controversial split decision of Hopkins-Shumenov narrowly beat the replay of Pacquiao-Bradley II.
Recap: Pac-Bradley replay 689. BHop win 760k; Porter fight, 897k; Quillin, 622k
— Kevin Iole (@KevinI) April 22, 2014
Hopkins’ victory scored just 760,000 Showtime subscribers while the undercard fared better. Shawn Porter’s dominating KO victory over Paulie Malignaggi scored 897,000 viewers and Peter Quillin’s win over Lukas Konecny received 622,000 viewers.
The replay of the Pacquiao-Bradley fight from April 12th did 689,000 viewers on HBO.
Payout Perspective:
Perhaps the Showtime card was overlooked as Hopkins did much better last October with 1 million viewers while Paulie Malignaggi did 1.28 million viewers in his fight against Adrien Broner last June and both were on the same card. I did not realize Paulie was on the same card as Hopkins until I tuned in. The rematch between Pacquiao and Bradley was respectable considering everyone knew the result. These fights went up against the UFC on Fox 11 card in some sections of the country.
People are starting to see through the pathetic combat sports and returning to the daddy that is WWE! Why else is boxing and MMGay doing so horribly yet WWE just gets stronger and stronger?
Zuffa is desparate
WWE created their network because their PPV industry was dying. Hardly getting stronger!