ESPN reports that HBO’s Saturday night’s 3 fight boxing event featuring Sergey Kovalev and Jean Pascal drew an average audience of 956,000 HBO subscribers for the complete event. The main event fight drew an average audience of 1.152 million viewers and peaked at 1.2 million.
Kovalev knocked out Pascal in the eighth round in front of his hometown fans at the Bell Centre in Montreal.
Broken down into fights, the opening bout featuring Isaac Chlemba and Vasily Lepikhin drew 850,000 viewers with a peak at 968,000. Chlemba defeated Lepikhin. In the second fight, Vyacheslav Glazkov defeated Steve Cunningham in a controversial decision. The fight drew 958,000 viewers peaking at 1.057 million.
The event did better than GGG last month although his fight was on a Saturday afternoon.
Top HBO Boxing ratings for 2015
Rios-Alvarado – 1.252M viewers (fight only)
Kovalev-Pascal – 1.152M viewers (fight only)
GGG-Murray – 862,000 viewers (fight only)
Payout Perspective:
The event drew well overall and increased throughout the 3 fight event. The fights, which went up against UFC 185, reflect the fact that boxing is experiencing a resurgence on television and HBO is benefitting. Kovalev is not a household name although he has been active of late. We shall see if PBC will detract or attract more fans for the HBO product.
Proves all our points! Boxing is still viable, did more numbers then mma for the week and will continue to ebb and flow. Boxing is like a cockroach, obviously there are a lot of morons who cant come to that conclusion.
How about we report the numbers for the show rather than single fights? It’s very misleading to headline UFC ratings with entire event numbers then cherry pick the highest fight on a card when reporting boxing numbers. The numbers are great info for the breakdown but not as the headline. Using the last fight on the card is basically the same as the peak. If boxing is going to have poor under cards and poor ratings then the media needs to not give them a pass and overlook it. Let it effect their overall numbers and maybe they will put out a better product.
TossedSalad, boxing hasn’t beat anything this week. The UFC is drawing more ratings with the 10th fight on their PPV prelims than boxing is with headliners.
Yea UFC does well when its free retard! So explain how the UFC helped HBO get over a million views during 185? Im waiting
here ya go fuck tard, yea not bad for free!! Boxing does better same night as UFC
http://www.mmafighting.com/2015/3/18/8240403/prelims-for-ufc-185-top-1-million-viewers
Good numbers. I’m really disapointed with there numbers on Spike though. should have been over 1.6 million average viewers since its in more homes. it should double HBO numbers. NBC numbers were strong though.
Sal is to retarded to realize boxing is free too. Those people aren’t paying for boxing you fucking idiot, they are paying for the movies/tv shows.
Fightbusiness in denial. The NBC numbers were awful for a debut. This was a horrible sign and the spike show was worse. They better pray something drastically changes or this will be the last hurrah for boxing. Haymon knows it.
*too*
HAHA!
Hey Sal, eat this shit:
Ross Pearson vs. Sam Stout posted nearly identical numbers and no one would confuse those two with big named headliners like these two boxers:
http://www.mmafighting.com/2015/3/18/8240403/prelims-for-ufc-185-top-1-million-viewers
Boxing is star driven while UFC is company driven.
UFC fights also dont last that long.
Watch a UFC fan when the fight goes past two rounds, they lose focus.
No heart, knowledge, or care for the actual arts being performed. They just want to see two idiots run and club at each other.
Thats why the UFC is folding. They built there fanbase on casual fans and WWE fans who are driven by the theatrics more so than the actual fight.
Cunningham got screwed and now he loses a big money fight with Klitschko which is very unfortunate for him. One thing we can all agree on is that boxing/MMA judging is horrendous.
Kovalev-Pascal was a great fight, but the rest of the card was forgettable. It looks like GGG and Kovalev can do around 1M views on premium cable which is solid and earns them a nice payday, but they don’t look like they’ll be ready to make the jump to PPV anytime soon.
@Diego – Cunningham has a great story and can’t seem to catch a break.
People still arguing about boxing and MMA why can’t we just notice both sports are doing pretty damn good…MMA is doing great and boxing also putting up very good ratings
@Jesus
I agree
Whats gonna happen is Adonis Stevenson is going to blast Sakio Bika out of the water on Saturday on CBS.
And then Haymon and them will negotiate to have Adonis Stevenson vs Sergey Kovalev on ABC to unify all 4 Light-Heavyweight belts sometime this summer.
The return of boxing to ABC with the two best LHWs in the world to unify all 4 major belts.
8m+ viewers
8m+ viewers??? HAHAHAHAHA!!! THE GAYEST…….DELUSIONS!!! HAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Let me know when they hit half of that.
By the way, the ufc is constantly growing while boxing is folding. It is kind of amusing how desperate you are to convince yourself of the opposite which is once again, a total delusion.
“Ufc is constantly growing while boxing is folding”
Major MMA promotions that have folded due to financial ruin in the past decade:
Pride, Dream, Elite XC and Strikeforce.
Major boxing promotions that have folded: None, the only promotion that has folded was Iron Mike Productions and they were far from being a major company.
The UFC is not constantly growing, they’ve already plateaued. Their best ratings on Fox pale in comparison to the ratings they were getting on Spike TV. Their attendance numbers are trending downwards. Their most hyped up fight in years Jones vs Cormier only had an abismal 11,500 people in attendance. In contrast, boxing in China which was non-existent up until a few years ago just drew 19 million viewers for a third tier fight. In just these past five years boxing has held stadium events in the US, Poland, Argentina and England. The UFC has only had one stadium fight ever and has never drawn over 20,000 fans inside the US. The attendance for just the Froch-Groves fight last year completely destroys the attendance record for MMA of 71K which was well over a decade ago and it was actually a K-1 show that featured some Pride fights. And what about sponsorships? I remember when Dana White claimed that Nike was dropping Pacquiao in favor of MMA and Jon Jones. Fast forward a few years later and Nike wants nothing to do with MMA and have only increased their investment in boxing.
“Major MMA promotions that have folded due to financial ruin in the past decade:
Pride, Dream, Elite XC and Strikeforce.”
Horribly flawed argument. First off, Pride didn’t fold due to financial ruin. As a matter of fact, they were doing very well financially still- they were forced to shut down due to political pressure about organized criminals being involved in their organization.
More importantly to address this nonsensical statement- all of those companies with the exception of DREAM, were bought out by the UFC which is constantly expanding. The point being, although those companies went under, the marketplace as a whole was still going strong.
Also, those major boxing promotions do operate like the mma promotions do. Those boxing promotions make pennies on the dollar compared to the mma promotions.
“The UFC is not constantly growing, they’ve already plateaued. Their best ratings on Fox pale in comparison to the ratings they were getting on Spike TV.”
More flawed arguments from a boxing troll. FS1 is an upstart tv channel and to compare them to an established brand like Spike is absurd and only an idiot would attempt it. Not to mention of course that we are seeing FS1’s numbers drastically improve and are far from plateaued.
The attendance numbers you provided are absurd. The number of people attending an event is irrelevant, the number that is relevant is how much people pay to view the event and those numbers are not declining. And explain to me how Jones- Cormier was a more hyped fight than Weidman-Silva II. Idiot.
Boxing in China generates next to zero revenue. How much was the tv contract for? A rickshaw?
Your stadium argument is idiotic. It makes no sense, has no logic. Again, what was the revenue for those events?
“The attendance for just the Froch-Groves fight last year completely destroys the attendance record for MMA of 71K which was well over a decade ago and it was actually a K-1 show that featured some Pride fights”
Idiot. Nice fact checking. The Pride Shockwave show did 91k in Japan and it was an mma show that had 1 k1 fight, Froch Groves II did 80k. Nice try moron.
” I remember when Dana White claimed that Nike was dropping Pacquiao in favor of MMA and Jon Jones. Fast forward a few years later and Nike wants nothing to do with MMA and have only increased their investment in boxing.”
Reebok just sponsored the entire ufc. Nice try again, idiot.
*major boxing promotions do operate like the mma promotions do.*
*major boxing promotions do not operate like the mma promotions do.*
Actually the K-1/PRIDE hybrid show was marketed primarily as a Dynamite! event. Dynamite is K-1’s brand. The attendance for that show was indeed 71k http://www.tapology.com/search/mma-event-figures/total-attendance
The Tokyo National Stadium isn’t even capable of holding 90K fans unless you had 30-40,000 people sitting on the field. The highest attended boxing match had over 135,000 in attendance and they were only able to fit about 15k on the massive Azteca Stadium field.
The Japanese media have a long history of exaggerating attendance figures for combat sports. They used to claim that a Mike Tyson fight drew over 90k at the Tokyo Dome but those figures were eventually discredited.
“Actually the K-1/PRIDE hybrid show was marketed primarily as a Dynamite! event. Dynamite is K-1’s brand. The attendance for that show was indeed 71k http://www.tapology.com/search/mma-event-figures/total-attendance”
Again, you should check your sources idiot. First off, The K1/Pride Hybrid show was marketed as a mma show and nearly every fight including the headliner which was Sakuraba vs Crocop and co headliner- Sapp vs Nog. was mma. The attendance for the show again was 91k again. By the way, there were fans at capacity on the field and the capacity is higher than your fabricated limit claims. Go watch the fight you idiot. The place is just waves of fans.
Stop using bullshit bloggers as your sources. You were wrong a number of times here. You should stop embarrassing yourself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_Shockwave
http://www5b.biglobe.ne.jp/~tjk/p-top/1231/020828/index.htm
By the way, your source completely contradicts your argument and the attendance figure they gave(which I’m sure you spent hours trying to find out of desperation), was probably a typo seeing how they said it was 71k, and the real number was 91k. Haha.
Another quote from that source:
” as the Ultimate Fighting Championship surges in virtually every measurable popularity metric, including Pay Per View buyrates, television ratings, and merchandise sales,”
They also clearly imply it is just a matter of time before they do get those stadium events.
Your own source contradicts your entire argument idiot. HAHA!
Comment didn’t go through, but here is what I said:
Again, you should check your sources idiot. First off, The K1/Pride Hybrid show was marketed as a mma show and nearly every fight including the headliner which was Sakuraba vs Crocop and co headliner- Sapp vs Nog. was mma. The attendance for the show again was 91k again. By the way, there were fans at capacity on the field and the capacity is higher than your fabricated limit claims. Go watch the fight you idiot. The place is just waves of fans.
Stop using bullshit bloggers as your sources. You were wrong a number of times here. You should stop embarrassing yourself.
Boxing has had multiple fights over 100k in attendance.
But i like how D tried to claim that attendance doesnt mean shit buy ppv does.
How can a so called “superfight” like Jones-Cormier not sell out?
U cant even sell out with your so called P4P best fighter in the world?
U cant claim the UFC is this big dominating force when they cant sell a fight worth a shit
THE GAYEST!!!!!!!!
He doesn’t understand basic economics. When boxing has free shows, the attendance is huge! HAHAHAHA!!!
How are your Art Jimmerson autographed posters? Have the been put in a safe yet? HAHAHAHAHA!!!
@d the story that goes with the attendance stats was written a while back and the ufc is no closer to doing more stadium shows. The statistics are updated constantly however and are very reliable. Tapology isn’t some simple blog, everything is researched very thoroughly. The reason why it looks like there is waves and waves of people is because it’s not a very large stadium. 71k in a stadium designed for 50k, and which has no upper deck is gonna look very impressive. You could say the same thing about Chavez-Whitaker or Ali-Spinks. Also, if you look at the video they left the running track completely open. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CchXFfj4hJQ
The field only has a very small crowd about 15k. So 48k in the seats plus 7k in the bleachers and 15k on the field would equal about 70,000 total attendance. And I doubt that all those people actually paid for their seats, in fact the stadiums official website doesn’t even list this event in their top 10 largest crowds. http://www.jpnsport.go.jp/kokuritu/sisetu//tabid/75/Default.aspx
Art Jimmerson autographed posters will sell for more than most UFC fighters make a fight.
Any boxing fan with a job buys showtime and hbo for boxing not stupid movies. D obviously has no idea how HBO and Showtime have built subscribers from their boxing. And both networks are in on the biggest fight ever hahahaha UFC has good free numbers hahaha How bout floyds gloves from MayPac, hahahaha
29 posts on boxing hahahaha even D posts on boxing. Another huge year for boxing Double ppv again hahahaha
It would be more like 35 posts on boxing if I didn’t keep getting a “your comment is awaiting moderation” message every time I try to post a comment with links attached.
Boxers who fight on Mayweather’s prelims can’t afford to buy groceries. UFC fighters who fight on free tv prelims are filthy rich compared to those peasants. HAHAHAHA!!!!
Saldaqueef with more of his delusions. No one gets showtime or hbo for boxing. They get it for the movies and tv shows. Everyone knows this other than the Arum fag boy who is on his homo war path. His delusions continue to grow and he thinks that double means less than. The UFC is having a huge ppv year, meanwhile boxing has 1 fight and then crickets.
Nice try homo.
Well I am at least one person who subscribes to HBO and Showtime just for boxing and in the past MMA/Strikeforce, D is wrong wrong wrong lol The more D types the more he looks like a moron, D takes the most insignificant point, or some rare exception to the rule and runs with it. hahaha desperation give it up D no one is buying your bullshit even Dana thinks you are a complete lunatic. But D plays every sport bahahahah but he cant name one, I’m sure you can google some information on a sport you can pretend to know about. bahahhaha Hey how is fight pass doing hahaha
Is that subscription payment from Arum for everytime he shoves his dick in your mouth you little fag?
The more Sal types, the more delusional he becomes. Every time you post something you lie, exaggerate, cherry pick stats, make claims that are delusions of grandeur followed by mostly incoherent rants that no one can decipher. No one takes you seriously. You are obviously a welfare paid boxing troll.